Quotes about industry
page 17

“The Bobbit case, which brought to life the ancient mythic archetype of woman as castrator, demonstrated that women are as aggressive as men and that sex is a dark, dangerous force of nature. But of course the feminist establishment, stuck in its battered-woman blinders, learned nothing as usual from this lurid refutation of its normal views. Classic art works like Bizet’s Carmen tell us more about the irrationality of love, jealousy and revenge than do all the pat formulas of the counseling industry.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 42

Love, Life, Women, Men

“If ever there was a theme song for the business end of the industry, it's: "We can't do that; we didn't do that yesterday."”

Frank Miller (1957) American writer, artist, film director

On the comics industry. p. 111
Eisner/Miller (2005)

Business

“The two most far-reaching critical theories at the beginning of the latest phase of industrial society were those of Marx and Freud. Marx showed the moving powers and the conflicts in the social-historical process. Freud aimed at the critical uncovering of the inner conflicts. Both worked for the liberation of man, even though Marx’s concept was more comprehensive and less time-bound than Freud’s.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

"The Art of Being" Pt. 3 (1989)

Time

“We have here the problem of bigness. Its lesson should by now have been burned into our memory by Brandeis. The Curse of Bigness' shows how size can become a menace – both industrial and social. It can be an industrial menace because it creates gross inequalities against existing or putative competitors. It can be a social menace – because of its control of prices. Control of prices in the steel industry is powerful leverage on our economy. For the price of steel determines the price of hundreds of other articles. Our price level determines in large measure whether we have prosperity or depression – an economy of abundance or scarcity. Size in steel should therefore be jealously watched. In final analysis, size in steel is the measure of the power of a handful of men over our economy. That power can be utilized with lightning speed. It can be benign or it can be dangerous. The philosophy of the Sherman Act is that it should not exist. For all power tends to develop into a government in itself. Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy. Industrial power should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men. The fact that they are not vicious men but respectable and social minded is irrelevant. That is the philosophy and the command of the Sherman Act. It is founded on a theory of hostility to the concentration in private hands of power so great that only a government of the people should have it.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, United States v. Columbia Steel Co., 334 U.S. 495 (1948)
Judicial opinions

Men, Hostility, People, Problem

“The entertainment industry makes this [phantasmagoria of distraction] easier by elevating the person to the level of the commodity. He surrenders to its manipulations while enjoying his alienation from himself and others. The enthronement of the commodity, with its lustre of distraction…is consistent with the split between utopian and cynical elements.”

Wilson Harris (1921–2018) Guyanese writer

Source: The Ghost of Memory (2006), p. 11.

Personality

“Less than a century ago the laborer had no rights, little or no respect, and led a life which was socially submerged and barren…. American industry organized misery into sweatshops and proclaimed the right of capital to act without restraints and without conscience. The inspiring answer to this intolerable and dehumanizing existence was economic organization through trade unions. The worker became determined not to wait for charitable impulses to grow in his employer. He constructed the means by which fairer sharing of the fruits of his toil had to be given to him or the wheels of industry, which he alone turned, would halt and wealth for no one would be available…”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Address to AFL–CIO (1961)

Life, Waiting, Wealth

“Our army, if it exists for honorable purposes only, will draw to it honorable men. It will call to it the best men of our race- men of skill and culture. It will not be recruited as so many modern nations are, from those who are industrially useless.”

Michael Collins (Irish leader) (1890–1922) Irish revolutionary leader

A Path to Freedom (2010), p. 64

Men, Drawing

“Playboy: Then for now, aren't you asking home-computer buyers to invest $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith?
Jobs: In the future, it won't be an act of faith. The hard part of what we're up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can't tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, "What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?" he wouldn't have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn't know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. But remember that first the public telegraph was inaugurated, in 1844. It was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn't have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it. So, fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing.
Playboy: Meaning what?
Jobs: It allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics. And we're in the same situation today. Some people are saying that we ought to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. It won't work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are "slash q-zs" and things like that. The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel—one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about. It's the first "telephone" of our industry. And, besides that, the neatest thing about it, to me, is that the Macintosh lets you sing the way the telephone did. You don't simply communicate words, you have special print styles and the ability to draw and add pictures to express yourself.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Steve Jobs, Playboy, Feb 1985, as quoted in “Steve Jobs Imagines 'Nationwide' Internet in 1985 Interview” https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/steve-jobs-imagines-nationwide-internet-in-1985-intervi-1671246589, Matt Novak, 12/15/14 2:20pm Paleofuture, Gizmodo. 1980s

People, World, Faith, Way

“In the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal “to go along” appears neurotic and impotent. This is the socio-psychological aspect of the political event that marks the contemporary period: the passing of the historical forces which, at the preceding stage of industrial society, seemed to represent the possibility of new forms of existence. But the term “introjection” perhaps no longer describes the way in which the individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by his society. Introjection suggests a variety of relatively spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the “outer” into the “inner.” Thus introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies—an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behavior. The idea of “inner freedom” here has its reality: it designates the private space in which man may become and remain “himself.” Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions. The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole. This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new “immediacy,” however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization. In this process, the “inner” dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking—the critical power of Reason—is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition. The impact of progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life. The efficiency of the system blunts the individuals' recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole. If the individuals find themselves in the things which shape their life, they do so, not by giving, but by accepting the law of things—not the law of physics but the law of their society.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 9-11

Life, Law, Way, Behavior

“Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the daily life of most humans ran its course within three ancient frames: the nuclear family, the extended family and the local intimate community.* Most people worked in the family business – the family farm or the family workshop, for example – or they worked in their neighbours’ family businesses. The family was also the welfare system, the health system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police.”

Yuval Noah Harari book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Life, People, Health, Education

“During the 1960s, and again in the 1970s, growth in manufacturing productivity in the United Kingdom was the lowest of all the seven major industrial countries in the world. During the 1980s, our annual rate of growth of output per head in manufacturing has been the highest of all the seven major industrial countries.”

Nigel Lawson (1932) British Conservative politician and journalist

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1987/mar/17/the-economic-background in the House of Commons (17 March 1987)

World, Country

“They will furnish credits which will serve us for the support of the Communist Party in their countries and, by supplying us materials and technical equipment which we lack, will restore our military industry necessary for our future attacks against our suppliers. To put it in other words, they will work on the preparation of their own suicide.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Reported by I. U. Annenkov in an article entitled, "Remembrances of Lenin", Novyi Zhurnal/New Review (September 1961), p. 147.
Attributions

Support, Suicide, Future, Country

“Our world model was built specifically to investigate five major trends of global concern – accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources, and a deteriorating environment. The model we have constructed is, like every model, imperfect, oversimplified, and unfinished… Our conclusions are : (1.) If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity…”

Eduard Pestel (1914–1988) scholar

The Limits to Growth, abstract established by Eduard Pestel http://www.unav.es/adi/UserFiles/File/80963990/The%20Limits%20to%20Growth%20Informe%20Meadows.pdf, 1972, by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis l. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, William W. Behrens III.

World, Food

“In retrospect, Mooney’s mission looks incredibly naive. It is astonishing that he could have been so close to affairs in Germany and yet not have realised the true nature of the Nazi regime; but it seems this was so. His efforts, though made in good faith, were kept secret at first, but eventually news leaked out and in the summer of 1940 PM magazine in the USA ran a series of articles accusing Mooney of Nazi sympathies and linking his meeting with Hitler to his earlier receipt of the German Order of Merit for services to industry in 1938.”

Morgen Witzel (1960) Canadian historian, business theorist

Source: Fifty key figures in management, 2004, p. 196

Secret, Faith, Nature, Effort

“One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the last ten years had given to the great mechanical energies — coal, iron, steam — a distinct superiority in power over the old industrial elements — agriculture, handwork, and learning; but the result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties resembled the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain, to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow — not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs — but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he — American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

War, World, Education, Learning

“There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies rather than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth, which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter III, "Liberty", p. 315.

Men, People, World, Angels

“This whole edifice of civilization is in its foundations and in all its stones nothing else than the result of the creative capacity, the achievement, the intelligence, the industry, of individuals: in its greatest triumphs it represents the great crowning achievement of individual God-favored geniuses, in its average accomplishment the achievement of men of average capacity, and in its sum doubtless the result of the use of human labor-force in order to turn to account the creations of genius and of talent. So it is only natural that when the capable intelligences of a nation, which are always in a minority, are regarded only as of the same value as all the rest, then genius, capacity, the value of personality are slowly subjected to the majority and this process is then falsely named the rule of the people. For this is not rule of the people, but in reality the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Speech to the Industry Club (21 January 1932) as quoted in The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922 – August 1939 (1994) by Norman Hepburn Baynes, Oxford University Press, p.783
1930s

Men, God, People, Stupidity

“The Internet will not become a money machine until the banking industry figures out how to transfer money for free so you can charge USD 0.005 (half a cent) for some simple service like, say, reading a newspaper article you have searched for. With today's payment system, the cost of the transfer of the funds completely dwarf the cost of the service paid for. … This situation, however, is what acutely prevents the Internet from taking off as a network for paid services.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: is it ok if I quote? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/2e6eea14913a5c55 Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Money, Search, Reading

“It need hardly be said that the social philosophy of the time did not remain unaffected by the political evolution and the industrial development. Slowly sinking into men's minds all this while was the conception of a new social nexus, and a new end of social life. It was discovered (or rediscovered) that a society is something more than an aggregate of so many individual units—that it possesses existence distinguishable from those of any of its components. A perfect city became recognized as something more than any number of good citizens—something to be tried by other tests, and weighed in other balances than the individual man. The community must necessarily aim, consciously or not, at its continuance as a community: its life transcends that of any of its members; and the interests of the individual unit must often clash with those of the whole.”

Sidney Webb, 1st Baron Passfield (1859–1947) British Baron and politician

Fabian Essays in Socialism &ndash; The Basis of Socialism &ndash; Historic http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Shaw/shwFS1.html#The%20Basis%20of%20Socialism,%20Historic,%20by%20Sidney%20Webb, The New Synthesis, I.1.47. Edited by George Bernard Shaw (1889)

Life, Men, Communication, Time

“From microchips to corn chips, software to soft drinks, and packaged goods to package delivery services, executives have watched the intensity and type of competition in their industries shift during the last few years. Industries have changed from slow moving, stable oligopolies to environments, characterized by intense and rapid competitive moves, in which competitors strike quickly with unexpected, unconventional means of competing. They now confront “hypercompetitors” who continuously generate new competitive advantages that destroy, make obsolete, or neutralize the industry leader’s advantages, leaving the industry in disequilibrium and disarray.”

Richard D’Aveni (1953) American economist

Richard A. D’Aveni (1997). " Waking up to the New Era of Hypercompetition https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233454654_Waking_Up_to_the_New_Era_of_Hypercompetition". The Washington Quarterly, Sept. 3, 1997. p. 183–195. Lead paragraph.

Drink, Change

“…if the Legislative Council really ends up with no representatives of industry and commerce, then it is possible that these sectors will comprehensively divest from Hong Kong.”

Gordon Wu (1935) Hong Kong businessman

Original:…如果立法會最終真係無工商界的代表，工商界可以唔同你玩，全面撤資囉。 Source: 胡應湘：爭拗至 2047 都無普選 http://www.hkreporter.com/talks/viewthread.php?tid=870295&page=1

“The successful construction of all machinery depends on the perfection of the tools employed; and whoever is a master in the arts of tool-making possesses the key to the construction of all machines… The contrivance and construction of tools must therefore ever stand at the head of the industrial arts.”

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. 173; As cited in: Samuel Smiles (1864) Industrial biography; iron-workers and tool-makers http://books.google.com/books?id=5trBcaXuazgC&pg=PA245, p. 245

Art, Success, Dependency, Perfection

“I'm an Internet expert too. It's all right to wire the industrial zone only, but there are many problems if other regions of the North are wired.”

Kim Jong-il (1941–2011) General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea

North Korea Dear Leader Kim Jong Il: "I'm an Internet expert too", Ars Technica, 2007-10-05, 2008-01-01 http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071005-north-korea-dear-leader-kim-jong-il-im-an-internet-expert-too.html,

Problem

“Queen Victoria on promotion of Lionel Rothschild to peerage: "It is not only the feeling, of which she cannot divest herself, against making a person of the Jewish religion, a Peer; but she cannot think that one who owes his great wealth to contracts with foreign Governments for Loans, or to successful speculation on the Stock Exchange, can fairly claim a British Peerage. However high Sir L. Rothschild may stand personally in public estimation, this seems to her not less a species of gambling because it is on a gigantic scale and far removed from that legitimate trading which she delights to honour, in which men have raised themselves by patient industry and unswerving probity to positions of wealth and influence."”

Victoria of the United Kingdom (1819–1901) British monarch who reigned 1837–1901

Gentile folly: the Rothschilds, by Arnold Leese.

Men, Religion, Feeling, Thinking

“At the heart of the book are the functional areas of an industrial firm. Although the data structures are thereby designed according to functional area the integration principle of supra-functional processing of tasks occupies the foreground. This book aims to achieve both a scientifically-based procedural method and a practically relevant, tried and tested approach. The author's experience of developing and introducing integrated information systems in several large industrial firms is incorporated in the treatment presented.”

August-Wilhelm Scheer (1941) German business theorist

August-Wilhelm Scheer (1989) Enterprise-wide Data Modelling: Information Systems in Industry. Springer-Verlag, p. vi.

Books, Heart

“The major cause [of the software crisis] is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem. In this sense the electronic industry has not solved a single problem, it has only created them, it has created the problem of using its products.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

1970s, The Humble Programmer (1972)

Problem, Sense

“Obstruction of mobility, where it occurs, is one of the most serious and intractable problems of industrial society.”

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist

Source: Nations and Nationalism (1983), Chapter 8, The Future Of Nationalism, p. 114

Problem

“I think I am easy to make fun of. I try not to pay too much attention. You can't let critics dictate what you do… The thing that fascinates me, is the emotion in music, the way it can make me cry or laugh or be angry. I'm not trying to be hip or cool, and I'm not scared to put everything I have into songs. Passion is the greatest thing that music can evoke. We live in a society where I think people often find it hard to express themselves, but sometimes a song can do that for you. It might not be groundbreaking, but there is something about the simplicity of presenting songs where it's all about the lyric and the melody. People don't need to get through a whole lot of production to get to the root of the song. It's just music doing what music does best… A lot of things in the mainstream are repetitive and soulless and have been churned out without any real conviction. It is really unfair to call Coldplay insufferable, when they obviously care about what they do. James [Blunt] too. Too much of the music industry is controlled by lawyers and businessmen, making music like it's a product on the factory line. That's what I call insufferable.”

Katie Melua (1984) British singer-songwriter

[Neil McCormick, Who is right? Critics or the public?, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/09/29/bmneil29.xml, The Telegraph, 2005-09-29]

People, Music, Way, Thinking

“Finally, a nation should not regard the progress of industries from a purely economic point of view. Manufactures become a very important part of the nation‘s political and cultural heritage.”

Friedrich List (1789–1846) German economist with dual American citizenship

Source: The Natural System of Political Economy (1837), p. 39

Parting

“The higher culture of the West—whose moral, aesthetic, and intellectual values industrial society still professes—was a pre-technological culture in a functional as well as chronological sense. Its validity was derived from the experience of a world which no longer exists and which cannot be recaptured because it is in a strict sense invalidated by technological society. Moreover, it remained to a large degree a feudal culture, even when the bourgeois period gave it some of its most lasting formulations. It was feudal not only because of its confinement to privileged minorities, not only because of its inherent romantic element (which will be discussed presently), but also because its authentic works expressed a conscious, methodical alienation from the entire sphere of business and industry, and from its calculable and profitable order.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 58

World, Business, Sense

“Time, and Industry, produce everyday new knowledge.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The Second Part, Chapter 30, p. 176
Leviathan (1651)

Knowledge, Time

“While it must be admitted that the class of rich absentee owners or investors would doubtless be far less interested in industry if the profit motive were eliminated or subordinated, they represent the group that makes the smallest actual contribution to efficiency in industry.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Property (1935)

Motivation

“An invariable accompaniment of growth in developed countries is the shift away from agriculture, a process usually referred to as industrialization and urbanization. The income distribution of the total population, in the simplest model, may therefore be viewed as a combination of the income distributions of the rural and of the urban populations. What little we know of the structures of these two component income distributions reveals that: (a) the average per capita income of the rural population is usually lower than that of the urban;' (b) inequality in the percentage shares within the distribution for the rural population is somewhat narrower than in that for the urban population… Operating with this simple model, what conclusions do we reach? First, all other conditions being equal, the increasing weight of urban population means an increasing share for the more unequal of the two component distributions. Second, the relative difference in per capita income between the rural and urban populations does not necessarily drift downward in the process of economic growth: indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that it is stable at best, and tends to widen because per capita productivity in urban pursuits increases more rapidly than in agriculture. If this is so, inequality in the total income distribution should increase”

Simon Kuznets (1901–1985) economist

Source: "Economic growth and income inequality," 1955, p. 7 as cited in: Anthony Barnes Atkinson, François Bourguignon, Handbook of Income Distribution, Vol. 1. Elsevier, 2000 p. 799

Country

“If the State has no right to interfere to protect the poor struggling against circumstances over which they have no control in the industrial world, it is difficult to see why the same State should be considered a beneficent agency when called in to protect the property of the rich against an infuriated mob of starving people. If the poor are to be left to struggle for existence unaided by the State, then why not the rich?”

Keir Hardie (1856–1915) Scottish socialist and labour leader

Source: From Serfdom to Socialism (1907), pp. 3-4

People, World

“The destruction of the old bonds between employers and workmen was not peculiar to manufactures; it came to pass in agriculture also. An agrarian as well as an industrial revolution had taken place. Scientific methods of cultivation had been substituted for unscientific; vast enclosures had been made; traces of the old three-field system of apportioning the land were fast disappearing; small farms were giving way to large. A new race of farmers, corresponding to the new race of manufacturers, had sprung into existence, who, enriched by the high prices which prevailed during the great war, changed their habits of life. The labourer ceased to be a member of the farmer's household, and, to use Cobbett's words, was thrust out of the farm-house into a hovel.”

Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) British economic historian

Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 191

Life, War, Way, Change

“You are now fixed at the mercy of no governor that comes to make his fortune great; you shall be governed by laws of your own making and live a free, and if you will, a sober and industrious life. I shall not usurp the right of any, or oppress his person. God has furnished me with a better resolution and has given me his grace to keep it.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

Letter to those already residing in Pennsylvania (1681)

Life, God, Law, Personality

“The war was fought throughout and ultimately won, not only by the usual military weapons in the narrower sense, but by the whole economic, industrial, and financial systems of the belligerent Powers. Food, shipping, metals and raw materials, credit, transport, industries and factories of all kinds played just as important a part as guns, rifles, aeroplanes, tanks, explosives and gas, warships and submarines.”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

The League of Nations - A Practical Suggestion, C: The League and World-Peace, Hodder and Stoughton, 1918

War, Food, Sense, Parting

“Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model. The great and the good of the Academy have been fighting a losing battle against the Anglo-Saxon hucksterization model for the past thirty years: But the sad truth is that the battle’s lost. The tide of war was turned in Beijing and New Delhi, when the rapidly industrializing new superpowers climbed on the MAKE MONEY FAST band-wagon and gave free rein to the free market, red in tooth and claw—just as long as the sharp bits were directed outwards. And today the entire world is still drowning in a sea of attention-grabbing unregulated unethical untruthful spamvertising.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 13, “Kemal: Spamcop” (pp. 154-155)

Money, War, Truth, World

“Yeah just so back to being Governor of New Mexico. I vetoed a bill that I think the label of the bill was Bringing Competition to the Telecommunications Industry of New Mexico… I vetoed it because the reality was that was the title but the reality was just the opposite. It was gonna actually make the environment less competitive. It was going to empower Quest communications to have more of a monopoly they it all ready had. That wasn’t the label of the bill. So net neutrality the notion is that it’s going to create a freer environment when the reality is.. is there really an issue now? And if you get government involved in getting its nose in the tent isn’t this ultimately gonna make things a lot worse and cost us a lot more than just doing nothing? So all of my free market friends, all of my computer savvy people that are advising me, say that net neutrality is anything but. All of what’s it supposed to accomplish that actually by supporting it you’re creating the opposite.”

Gary Johnson (1953) American politician, businessman, and 29th Governor of New Mexico

Statement made to representatives of the Pagan Newswire Collective (PNC)
2011-10-16
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/paganswithdisabilities/2011/10/full-transcript-of-qa-with-presidential-candidate-gary-johnson/
2012-02-24
2011

People, Communication, Support, Thinking

“Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

"Four Letters: Escapism" (1936)
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

Past

“Industry must further expand its horizon of thinking and action Industry must further expand its horizon of thinking and action. It must assume the role of an enlightened industrial statesmanship. To the extent that it accepts such broadened responsibilities, to that degree does it assure the maintenance of private enterprise, and with it the exercise of free initiative as the most efficient creator of wealth.
During the past few years it has become the vogue to discredit every instrumentality of accomplishment, be it the individual or the machine. It has been said that American industry is selfish. It would be far more just to say that it has been preoccupied — preoccupied in exploring the secrets of nature and creating a continuous flow of new products.
But, as we look forward, and as we analyze the evolution that has occurred, I am convinced that industry's responsibilities can no longer be adequately discharged, however efficient and effective it may be, with the mere physical production of goods and services.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

as cited in: Thurman Arnold. The Folklore of Capitalism. (2000), p. 72
New York Times interview, 1935

Secret, Exercises, Nature, Thinking

“Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries.”

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

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 24

Knowledge

“Another workingman named Bóndaref, was also of immense practical help to Tolstoy, chiefly through his remarkable book "Industry and Idleness.".. Bóndaref insists that the "chief, primary, and most immutable" law for humanity is that every man must earn his own bread with his own hands. "Bread labor," as thus understood, includes all heavy rough work necessary to save man from death by hunger and cold and this bread includes, of course, food, drink, clothes, shelter, and fuel…. As the world has rarely heard such teachings since the days of the Apostles and the early Christian Fathers, Tolstoy seemed to consider Bóndaref as the discoverer of a new truth which he eagerly accepted as fundamental to a just life…. he emphasized the point that children must he taught above all things to do hard productive labor. They must be taught to be ashamed from the very beginning to use, and profit by, the labor of others.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 24-25

Life, Death, Hunger, Children

“Management Mind in the Automobile Industry has always had a great contempt for politics. The point has been missed that although we, in the Automobile Industry have continually dismissed politics and government as quite unworthy of the attention of serious-minded men like ourselves, politics and government have been continually increasing their interest in the Automobile.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

James D. Mooney (1933), cited in: Glenn Yago (1980), ;;The Decline of Public Transit in the United States and Germany. p. 39

Men

“Three cents’ worth of squeeze bottles, plus two cents’ worth of homogenized goo, plus prime-time television equals 28 million annual sales at 69 cents each. This is the heartbeat of industrial America.”

John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) writer from the United States

Travis McGee series, (1964)

Time

“The Kahal is the corrupting factor which changes our state - it is the cause of the seizure, the trusts, the failures that undermine trade, industry and agriculture in Romania - it is the body that wanders through the public newspapers which it subsidizes - it is the agent spreading the insidious ideas of materialism and liberalism, socialism, anarchism - it is the power of occult Freemasonry. The Kahal is, finally, the agent of revolutions that shook the world and, for some time, troubled the peace of the wretched Romanian people. This is the occult Jewish power against which mankind is disarmed, because they do not know.”

Nicolae Paulescu (1869–1931) Romanian academic

From Fiziologia Filozofică: Spitalul, Coranul, Talmudul, Cahalul, Franc-Masoneria ("Philosophic Physiology: The Hospital, the Koran, the Talmud, the Kahal and Freemasonry"), vol. II., Bucharest, 1913.

People, World, Peace, Idea

“In the modern industrial communities… the apparatus of living has grown so elaborate and cumbrous… that the consumers of these things cannot make way with them in the required manner without help.”

Thorstein Veblen book The Theory of the Leisure Class

Source: The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), p. 65-66

Way, Communication, Help

“When you have trouble with things—whether it's figuring out whether to push or pull a door or the arbitrary vagaries of the modern computer and electronics industries—it's not your fault. Don't blame yourself: blame the designer.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Introduction to the 2002 Edition, p. x.
The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002)

“O. R.'s initial development began in the United Kingdom during World War II and was quickly taken up in the United States. This start took place in a military context. After the war O. R. moved into business, industry and civil government. This movement was slower in the United States than in the United Kingdom but in 1951 industrial O. R. took hold in this country and has since developed very rapidly.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1940s - 1950s, Introduction to Operations Research (1957), p. 3

War, World, Business, Country

“Our new aim is the organisation of the material environment, i. e. of contemporary industrial production, and all active artistic creativity must be directed towards this.”

Lyubov Popova (1889–1924) Russian artist

Quote, End of 1921, from; Liubov Popova, untitled manuscript, cited by A. Adaskina in 'Liubov' Popova. Put' stanovleniia khudozhnika-konstruktora', 'Tekhnicheskaia estetika', no.11, 1978, p.19; as quoted by Christina Lodder in Tate Papers no. 14: Liubov Popova: From Painting to Textile Design http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/liubov-popova-from-painting-to-textile-designhttp://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/liubov-popova-from-painting-to-textile-design

“Besides the progress of industry and technique, we see a growing discontent among the masses; we see, besides the expansion ("expansion,", Fr.) of instruction, distrust and hatred expanding among nations ("s'étendre la méfiance et la haine entre," Fr.), that vie with one another ("qui rivalisent à l'envi," Fr.), by the increase of their armies and the improvement of their engines of murder”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

"engins meurtriers", Fr
Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 37 - third thought of the book, the translator.

“The socio-technical concept arose in conjunction with the first of several field projects undertaken by the Tavistock Institute in the coal-mining industry in Britain. The time (1949) was that of the postwar reconstruction of industry in relation to which the Institute had two action research projects.(2) One project was concerned with group relations in depth at all levels (including the management/labor interface) in a single organization - an engineering company in the private sector. The other project focused on the diffusion of innovative work practices and organizational arrangements that did not require major capital expenditure but which gave promise of raising productivity. The former project represented the first comprehensive application in an industrial setting of the socio-clinical ideas concerning groups being developed at the Tavistock.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

Source: The evolution of socio-technical systems, (1981), p. 7

Idea, Time

“America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.”

Ayn Rand book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

Men, People, Way, Suffering

“The year 1844 saw the beginning of Marx’ s friendship and collaboration with Friedrich Engels, whom he had already met briefly in Cologne. Engels had been through a similar spiritual evolution to Marx, though their early education was different. Born on 28 November 1820, Engels was the son of a manufacturer at Barmen (Wuppertal, near Dü sseldorf). He grew up in a stifling atmosphere of narrow-minded pietism, but soon escaped from its influence, leaving school before his final year to work in his father’ s factory; in 1838 he was sent to Bremen to gain business experience. As a result of practical contact with trade and industry he soon became interested in social questions.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 144
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume I, The Founders

Friendship, Education, School, Question

“In many respects, the Second World War was a continuation of the First, a conflict triggered by the mismatch between industrial power and imperial reach.”

David McNally (1953) Canadian political scientist

Source: Another World Is Possible : Globalization and Anti-capitalism (2002), Chapter 4, The Colour Of Money, p. 150

War, World

“The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, government relief for the destitute and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome. When in the thirties the wave of union organization crested over the nation, it carried to secure shores not only itself but the whole society.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Speech to the state convention of the Illinois American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO) (7 October 1965) http://www.aft.org/yourwork/tools4teachers/bhm/mlktalks.cfm, as quoted in Now Is the Time. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Labor in the South: The Case for a Coalition (January 1986) 1960s

Life, Age, Hope, Birth

“Looking around and sizing the situation, it seems to me that the real danger before our country is the crushing down of individual freedom and initiative by the steamroller of government authority. Already we see indications of this in the... legislative measures having an expropriatory [sic] character and the passage of taxation and other bills calculated to kill private enterprise in the field of industrial development... Democracy without freedom for the individual is a sham and a delusion.”

C. V. Raman (1888–1970) Indian physicist

In an interview with the Indian Express on 15 August 1954 http://books.google.com.kh/books?id=RbgXRdnHkiAC&pg=PA224&lpg=PA224&dq=cv+raman+looking+down+and+sizing+the+situation&source=bl&ots=preDjltao8&sig=J4b2YkQoKPAZiK9iofszC60u5Ss&hl=en&sa=X&ei=yrLtU_6mGsrn8AXfjYL4DA&redir_esc=y.

Democracy, Freedom, Country

“I want to make films and write films, which will happen, I'm just taking a different route right now. I'm a bit of a chameleon with the whole entertainment industry so to speak.”

David Boreanaz (1969) American actor, famous for Angel and Buffy

Interview with a vampire By Chuck Holliday

“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Two, Chapter VI.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Two

Men, Fate, People, Pleasure

“A second principle of Americanization is identity of economic interest. At this time, after all America has united to win the war, one hesitates to turn a page so shameful in American history. And yet, if America reverts to its former industrial brutality and indifference, Americanization will fail. Identity of economic interest, generally speaking, has meant to the American getting the immigrant to work for him at as low a wage as possible, for as long hours as possible, and scrapping him at the end of the game, with as little compunction as he did an old machine. And the immigrant's successful fellow-countryman, elevated to be a private banker, a padrone, or a notary public, has shared the practices of the native American. Always the immigrant has been in positions of the greatest danger, and with less safeguards for his care. He has been called by number and nicknamed and ridiculed. Frequently trades-unions have excluded him from their benefits, compensation laws have discriminated against him, trades have been closed to him, until he has wondered in the bitterness of his spirit what American opportunity was and how he could pursue life, liberty, and happiness at his work. Whenever he has been discontented, the popular remedy has been higher wages or shorter hours, and rarely the expansion of personal relationships. Very little self-determination has been given to him; on the contrary he has been made a cog in a highly organized industrial machine. His spirit has been imprisoned in the hum of machinery. His special gifts have been lost, even as his lack of skill in mechanical work has injured delicate processes and priceless materials. His pride has been humiliated and his initiative stifled because he has been given little of the artisan's pleasure in seeing his finished product.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life, War, Pleasure, Law

“I’ve been in the entertainment industry ever since, in one capacity or another. It’s better than the Inquisition. Usually.”

Kage Baker book Sky Coyote

Source: Sky Coyote (1999), Chapter 35 (p. 287)

“The triumph of the industrial arts will advance the cause of civilization more rapidly than its warmest advocates could have hoped, and contribute to the permanent prosperity and strength of the country far more than the most splendid victories of successful war.”

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. xii-xiii; Cited in: Samuel Smiles Industrial biography; iron-workers and tool-makers http://books.google.com/books?id=5trBcaXuazgC&pg=PA104, (1864) p. 104

War, Hope, Art, Success

“It is traditional in the theory of the firm to define the production opportunity set available to the firm in terms of its boundary -- the maximum attainable set of output quantities for various input quantities, given the state of technology and knowledge. This boundary is the production function of the firm. One of our purposes here is to point out the dependence of such production functions on the structure of property rights and contracting rights within which the firm exists. We redefine the production function in order to recognize the dependence of output on the structure of property and contracting rights. That expanded framework is then used to discuss a concrete set of problems surrounding the role of labor in the firm ranging from the 'labor-managed firm' system (in which tradable capital value residual claims [common stock] are legally prohibited), and the codetermination and industrial democracy movements (in which management participation by labor is required by law), to cooperatives and professional partnerships (i. e., quasi-labor-managed firms which arise out of the voluntary contracting process), and the capitalist corporation.”

Michael Jensen (1939) American economist

Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling. "Rights and production functions: An application to labor-managed firms and codetermination." Journal of business (1979): 469-506.

Law, Democracy, Knowledge, Problem

“Kinna-Uganda has something to do with mediocrity. We should follow the trends of other industries like Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood; let us call our films Ugawood.”

Usama Mukwaya (1989) Ugandan screenwriter

Source: " Ugawood or Kinna-Uganda? Film stars split over name http://www.observer.ug/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=17873&catid=42&Itemid=74 at The Observer. 12 March 2013 written by Polly Kamukama

“Though the ancient world understood that work was a curse, modern industrial society spreads its gospel. The working class, Lafargue hopelessly hoped, must reject the work fetish.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), p. 26

World, Hope

“Is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it's only the other fellow who's greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it's exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

from an interview with Phil Donahue (1979): partial transcript http://www.slobodaiprosperitet.tv/en/node/847 from SiP TV ; or find link to full interview in the External links Section

People, World, Way, History

“Without the progress of equality and improvement in the level of living at least beyond the poverty line, for one quarter of the population of the world who live in South Asia, there would be grave repercussions on the rest of the world. The problem of the underdeveloped country is, in one sense, of greater concern to the advanced countries because international rivalries and tensions arise from the desire to establish spheres of inﬂuence over underdeveloped areas. The very existence of underdeveloped regions would he therefore a continuing threat to world security, and world peace. A quick transformation of the underdeveloped countries into industrialized economies would reduce the sphere of conflicting interests; and hence decrease the tension between East and West.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

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

World, Peace, Problem, Sense

“The emergence of new media (and therefore artistic) formats is certainly interesting. But etching information into copper plates is just as exciting. We think that the perpetual return of 'the new', to cite Walter Benjamin, is nothing to write home about - except perhaps for the slave-drivers in the fashion industry. We've never been interested in the new just in itself, but in the accidental occurrence. In the moment where things don't tally, where productive confusion arises. That's why in the final analysis, although we've laughed a lot with Stewart Home, we even reject the meta-criticism of innovation-fixation articulated in 'neoism.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

The new sorts itself out when it lands in the museum. Finito. Interview on Furtherfield http://www.furtherfield.org/features/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-3

Home, Fashion, Thinking

“…evidence-based approach, the U. S. negotiators argued, is interference with free markets, because corporations must have the right to deceive. […] The claim itself is kind of amusing, I mean, even if you believe the free market rhetoric for a moment. The main purpose of advertising is to undermine markets. If you go to graduate school and you take a course in economics, you learn that markets are systems in which informed consumers make rational choices. That's what's so wonderful about it. But that's the last thing that the state corporate system wants. It is spending huge sums to prevent that, which brings us back to the viability of American democracy. For many years, elections here, election campaigns, have been run by the public relations industry and each time it's with increasing sophistication. And quite naturally, the industry uses the same technique to sell candidates that it uses to sell toothpaste or lifestyle drugs. The point is to undermine markets by projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information, and similarly, to undermine democracy by the same method, projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information. The candidates are trained, carefully trained, to project a certain image. Intellectuals like to make fun of George Bush's use of phrases like “misunderestimate,” and so on, but my strong suspicion is that he's trained to do that. He's carefully trained to efface the fact that he's a spoiled frat boy from Yale, and to look like a Texas roughneck kind of ordinary guy just like you, just waiting to get back to the ranch that they created for him…”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

25th anniversary of the International Relations Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, January 26, 2005
Quotes 2000s, 2005

School, Guy, Democracy, Boy

“Traditional guerrilla activity such as bombings, snipings and kidnappings complete with printed manifestos seem like so many ecologically risky short change feedback devices compared with the real possibilities of portable video, maverick data banks, acid metaprogramming, Cable TV, satellites, cybernetic craft industries, and alternative lifestyles. Yet the guerrilla tradition is highly relevant in the current information environment. Guerrilla warfare is by nature irregular and non-repetitive. Like information theory, it recognizes that redundancy can easily become reactionary and result in entropy and defeat.”

Paul Ryan (video artist) (1943–2013) American video artist

Paul Ryan, "Cybernetic Guerilla Warfare," Radical Software 3 (Spring 1971): 1

Nature, Change

“Out upon the folly which, in estimating human misery, allows aught to bear comparison with the agony of the poor! I use the word poor relatively; I call not those poor to whom honesty brings self-respect, whose habits and whose means have gone together, and whose industry is its own support. But those are the poor whose exertion supplies not their wants—to whom cold, hunger, and weariness, are common feelings; who have known better days—to whom the past furnishes contrast, and the future fear.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Hunger, Fear, Feeling, Support

“The Noisiest buzz in the industry lately has been over the emerging use of cable TV systems to provide fast network data transmissions using a device called a cable modem. But the likelihood of this technology succeeding is zilch.”

John C. Dvorak (1952) US journalist and radio broadcaster

"The Looming Cable Modem Fiasco" in PC Magazine (12 September 1995) http://web.archive.org/web/20000118075802/www.zdnet.com/pcmag/issues/1415/pcm00059.htm 1980s & 1990s

“Welfarism and excessive spending and deficits and socialism divide us, because everybody has to go to Washington. Those who have the biggest clout, whose who are the best lobbyists, those who go and they grab. And whether it's the medical industrial complex, or the banking industry, or the military industrial complex, that's who ends up controlling our government… For so long, conservatives and constitutionalists have lost the argument, they lost the moral highground. Because those who want to give things away, not talking about where they steal it from, but they want to give things and take care of people, they get the moral highground and they come by as being compassionate. And we who believe in liberty, we lack compassion. But the truth is, there's only one compassionate system known to man, and that is freedom and personal responsibility, then there's enough wealth, and then we will all have personal responsibility to use this compassion that we have, first to take care of our families and friends and neighbors, and there would be so much wealth that we could spread this wealth around the world.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

New Hampshire Homeschool Meet and Greet, September 30, 2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA0-OIdm6Z8 2000s, 2006-2009

People, Truth, World, Family

“The only answer to Socialism was to build up by every means a property-owning democracy. Socialism promised to build up a great pauper State by its schemes for State relief, nationalization and doles, while the Conservative Party promised to build up a great property-owning, thrifty, and industrious State.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

Speech ('The Future of Conservatism') to the 1912 Club (16 February 1926), quoted in The Times (18 February 1926), p. 9.
1920s-1950s

Democracy

“I commend to all the virtues of industry and thrift, which I believe go hand in hand. The labor and thrift of the people make a nation, a community, or a family strong. Work and thrift make the family independent.”

Gordon B. Hinckley book Standing for Something

Standing for Something: Ten Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes.

People, Family, Communication, Strong

“Greenock was one of the great centres of the sugar trade…Then came foreign competition, aided by bounties; and your trade declines so seriously that only the very best, the very richest, the most enterprising, the most inventive can possibly retain their hold upon it. If there had been no bounties and no unfair competition of this kind what would have happened? In the last 20 or 30 years the consumption of sugar throughout the world has increased enormously. The consumption in this country has increased enormously; and you would have had your share…if normal conditions and equal fairness had prevailed; and at this moment in Greenock, quite independently of the other industries you may have found to occupy you, there would have been in sugar alone ten times as many men employed as there were in the most palmy days of the trade. But normal conditions have not obtained. You have been the sufferers; and, as I have said, a great number of your refineries have been closed, have disappeared altogether. The capital invested in them has been lost, and the workmen who work in them—what has become of them?”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech in Greenock (7 October 1903), quoted in The Times (8 October 1903), p. 8.
1900s

Men, World, Suffering, Time

“Thanks to the doctrine of national environment which Owen was the first to preach — Knowledge is greater; Life is longer; Health is surer; Disease is limited; Towns are sweeter; Hours of labour are shorter; Men are stronger; Women are fairer; Children are happier; Industry is held in more honour, and is better rewarded; Co-operation carries wholesome food and increased income into a million homes where they were unknown before, and has brought us nearer and nearer to that state of society which Owen strove to create — in which it shall be impossible for men to be depraved or poor.”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

Memorial dedication (1902)

Life, Women, Men, Children

“North American banks and capitalists soon controlled the commercial exploitation of sugar and, furthermore, a good share of the industrial output of the land. In this way, a monopolistic control was established by U. S. interests in all aspects of a sugar production, which soon became the predominant factor in our foreign trade due to the rapidly developing monoproductive characteristics of the country.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

The Cuban Economy (1964)

Way, Country

“It is no more than fair that England, now that she has attained the culminating point of her industrial growth and progress, should restore again to the nations of Continental Europe a portion of those productive forces which she originally derived from them.”

Friedrich List (1789–1846) German economist with dual American citizenship

Source: The National System of Political Economy (1841), p. 56

“Today the courts are choked with lawsuits brought by people against the New King. When they sue each other as a result of an automobile accident they in fact sue the King, for both parties are likely insured. … Steadily the courts have become clearing-houses for the insurance industry.”

Gerry Spence (1929) American lawyer

Source: From Freedom to Slavery (1996), Ch. 6 : The New King : Tyranny of the Corporate Core, p. 91

People, Housing

“Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age’s vaunted ‘communications industry’ had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.”

Fritz Leiber book The Wanderer

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 21 (p. 158).

Death, People, Age, Communication

“A fight back against this Government's policies will inevitably take place outside rather than inside Parliament. When I talk about 'extra-parliamentary action' there is a great outcry in the press and from leading Tories about my refusal to accept the democratic will of the people. I am not prepared to accept policies elected by a minority of the British electorate. I am not prepared quietly to accept the destruction of the coal industry, nor am I willing to see our social services decimated. This totally undemocratic Government can now easily push through whatever laws it chooses. Faced with possible parliamentary destruction of all that is good and compassionate in our society, extra-parliamentary action will be the only course open to the working class and the Labour movement.”

Arthur Scargill (1938) British trade unionist

Speech in Perth (4 July 1983), quoted in Paul Routledge, "Pit leaders seek backing for big pay increases", The Times (5 July 1983), p. 1

People, Law, Fight

“The writer, who as an engineer has spent most of his life in factories, is inclined to look at the basis for investment from a technological point of view… Consider … the class of industrial investments only… The situation is one of entrepreneurs and boards of directors considering, from time to time, various ’possibilities of investment’, such as extra lathes or looms, an extension to a factory, a venture in some completely new product, and so on. It is helpful to think of these ’opportunities for investment’ as existing, in a given situation, in great number and variety, whether they are at that moment under active consideration or not. When any such possibility is considered it is assessed in respect of ’expected profitability’. One may conveniently think of all possibilities of investment as ’quanta’ that can be placed in a schedule of small ranges of expected profitability according to these assessments. The placement of a given ’opportunity for investment’ on this schedule has some ’margin of uncertainty”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

a curious analogy with the case of the quanta of physics
Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. 103; As cited in: Prices Revalued as Information: Circuit Elements, online document 2013

Life, Thinking, Time, Help

“Generations of Americans will pay the Republican campaign debt to the energy industry with global instability, depleted national coffers and increased vulnerability to price shocks in the oil market. They will also pay with reduced prosperity and quality of life at home. Pollution from power plants and traffic smog will continue to skyrocket. Carbon-dioxide emissions will aggravate global warming. Acid rain from Midwestern coal plants has already sterilized half the lakes in the Adirondacks and destroyed the forest cover in the high peaks of the Appalachian range up into Canada. The administration's attacks on science and the law have put something even greater at risk. Americans need to recognize that we are facing not just a threat to our environment but to our values, and to our democracy.”

Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. (1954) American activist

In "Crimes against nature" in Rolling Stone magazine (11 December 2003).

Life, Law, Democracy, Home

“Rolling Stone: It's been 10 years since the Macintosh was introduced. When you look around at the technological landscape today, what's most surprising to you?
Jobs: People say sometimes, "You work in the fastest-moving industry in the world." I don't feel that way. I think I work in one of the slowest. It seems to take forever to get anything done. All of the graphical-user interface stuff that we did with the Macintosh was pioneered at Xerox PARC [the company's legendary Palo Alto Research Center] and with Doug Engelbart at SRI [a future-oriented think tank at Stanford] in the mid-'70s. And here we are, just about the mid-'90s, and it's kind of commonplace now. But it's about a 10-to-20-year lag. That's a long time.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

1990s

People, World, Way, Feeling

“The man with a job to offer or land to sell has been America's land interpreter. On him has fallen the burden of presenting its romance, adventure, and beauty. He has failed so often because the land was not enriched by that cultural development and by those associations which satisfy the immigrant's need. The method has been to build a good industrial plant and to let the village grow up about it, with little thought of satisfying the longings of men for religion, knowledge, recreation, or even so simple a thing as gardens. Some time ago a factory having some idle land wondered what it could do for Mr. Hoover and started factory gardens, giving each man a small plot. The management made a discovery. The gardens cut down labor turnover. The crops were worth very little money, but the men did not want to leave until they had their potatoes in.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Men, Money, Religion, Beauty

“In America, despite the amazing rise in productivity we’ve had in the last 30 years, real wages have actually gone down. All of the increase in productivity has been taken by the finance, insurance, and real estate sector, called the FIRE sector, almost all of it by the financial sector. … So instead of having industrial capitalism a century ago, we have a finance capitalism that actually is stifling industrial capitalism here. So what Alan Greenspan and others call the postindustrial economy is really neo-feudalism. It’s a financialized economy where all of the surplus goes to the banks.”

Michael Hudson (economist) (1939) American economist

Deficit Hawks One Two Punch http://michael-hudson.com/2010/12/deficit-hawks-one-two-punch/ (December 16, 2010) Michael-Hudson.com, 1998-

“Socialists then shift the ground for taking industries into “public ownership”. They then tell us that some industries cannot survive any longer unless they are taken into public ownership, allegedly to protect the public from the effects of their collapse. It all sounds so cosy, and so democratic. But is it true? No, of course it isn't. The moment ownership passes into the name of the public is the moment the public ceases to have any ownership or accountability, and often the moment when it ceases to get what it wants. But it is invariably the moment when the public starts to pay. Pays to take the industry over. Pays the losses by higher taxes. Pays for inefficiencies in higher prices.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Finchley Conservatives (31 January 1976) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102947 Leader of the Opposition

Loss

“Another reason is because industry is the most important field of human activity, and management is the fundamental element in industry. It is now generally recognized that not bankers, not stockholders, but management is the pivot of business success. It is good management that draws credit, that draws workers, that draws customers. Moreover, whatever changes should come, whether industry is owned by individual capitalists, or by the State, or by the workers, it will always have to be managed. Management is a permanent function of business.”

Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) American academic

Source: Dynamic administration, 1942, p. xx

Business, Change, Success, Drawing

“I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to William Ludlow (6 September 1824)
1820s

Thinking

“Those [forest] reserves are not merely for the convenience and benefit of the people near them, but they are the property of the nation and for its greatest good. It is unreasonable to suppose that they should be destroyed or imperiled for any local convenience, as a mere present to men engaged in one local industry.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

statement by Muir quoted in news report "Started for Alaska: Harriman Exploring Expedition in Portland" in the Portland Morning Oregonian, 31 May 1899, page 12, columns 1-5 (at column 4)
1890s

Men, People

“I am proud and honored to be joining President-elect Trump’s administration as his Secretary of Agriculture,” Perdue said Thursday. “Beginning as a simple Georgia farm boy, making sure Americans who make their livelihood in the agriculture industry are thriving is near and dear to my heart, and I’m going to champion the concerns of American agriculture and work tirelessly to solve the issues facing our farm families in this new role.”

Sonny Perdue (1946) 31st and current United States Secretary of Agriculture and 81st Governor of Georgia

January 2017

Family, Boy, Heart

“The greatest American industry—why has no one ever said so?—is the industry of using words. We pay tens of millions of people to spend their lives lying to us, or telling us the truth, or supplying us with a nourishing medicinal compound of the two. All of us are living in the middle of a dark wood—a bright Technicolored forest—of words, words, words. It is a forest in which the wind is never still: there isn’t a tree in the forest that is not, for every moment of its life and our lives, persuading or ordering or seducing or overawing us into buying this, believing that, voting for the other.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Taste of the Age”, pp. 27–28
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

Life, People, Truth, Lying

“It’s not about hair, it’s about being you--whether that’s something the industry has seen before and accepts or not.”

Nicole Lapin (1984) American journalist

On not cutting her hair
Powergirls Magazine Cover Story

“Some of these big firms often believe in the white guy in a hoodie disrupting a whole industry. So we’re going to disrupt it by making sure we’re indexing for women and minorities because they’ve got great ideas.”

Melinda Gates (1964) American businesswoman, philanthropist and co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

mentioned 30 May 2018 by Fortune http://fortune.com/2018/05/30/melinda-gates-limited-partner-venture-capital/?utm_source=fortune.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=social-button-sharing then 31 May 2018 by Business Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/melinda-gates-has-sharp-words-for-the-vc-industry-2018-5 and 5 June 2018 by The Federalist http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/05/melinda-gates-bashes-white-guys-says-shell-discriminate/

Women, Guy, Idea

“Today, I would like to provide the American people with an update on the White House transition and our policy plans for the first 100 days. Our transition team is working very smoothly, efficiently, and effectively. Truly great and talented men and women, patriots indeed are being brought in and many will soon be a part of our government, helping us to Make America Great Again. My agenda will be based on a simple core principle: putting America First. Whether it's producing steel, building cars, or curing disease, I want the next generation of production and innovation to happen right here, in our great homeland: America – creating wealth and jobs for American workers. As part of this plan, I've asked my transition team to develop a list of executive actions we can take on day one to restore our laws and bring back our jobs. It's about time. These include the following: On trade, I am going to issue our notification of intent to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a potential disaster for our country. Instead, we will negotiate fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back onto American shores. On energy, I will cancel job-killing restrictions on the production of American energy – including shale energy and clean coal – creating many millions of high-paying jobs. That's what we want, that's what we've been waiting for. On regulation, I will formulate a rule which says that for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated, it's so important. On national security, I will ask the Department of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop a comprehensive plan to protect America's vital infrastructure from cyber-attacks, and all other form of attacks. On immigration, I will direct the Department of Labor to investigate all abuses of visa programs that undercut the American worker. On ethics reform, as part of our plan to Drain the Swamp, we will impose a five-year ban on executive officials becoming lobbyists after they leave the Administration – and a lifetime ban on executive officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. These are just a few of the steps we will take to reform Washington and rebuild our middle class. I will provide more updates in the coming days, as we work together to Make America Great Again for everyone.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

A Message from President-Elect Donald J. Trump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xX_KaStFT8 (21 November 2016) 2010s, 2016, November

Women, Men, People, Disease

“The cultural invasion is like a leafy tree which prevents us from seeing our own sun, sky and stars. Therefore in order to be able to see the sky above our heads, our task is to cut this tree off at the roots. US imperialism understands very well the magic of communication through music and persists in filling our young people with all sorts of commercial tripe. With professional expertise they have taken certain measures: first, the commercialization of the so-called ‘protest music’; second, the creation of ‘idols’ of protest music who obey the same rules and suffer from the same constraints as the other idols of the consumer music industry – they last a little while and then disappear. Meanwhile they are useful in neutralizing the innate spirit of rebellion of young people. The term ‘protest song’ is no longer valid because it is ambiguous and has been misused. I prefer the term ‘revolutionary song’.”

Víctor Jara (1932–1973) Pro teacher, theatre director, poet, singer-songwriter, and political activist

In 1969 Jara commented about the distinction between the commercialised ‘protest song phenomenon’ imported into Chile and the nature of the New Chilean Song Movement (NCC).
Jara, Joan (1983). Victor: An Unfinished Song. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-02954-1. p. 121

People, Music, Star, Communication

“I had trouble at first, in the early 1900s, in selling Mr. Leland our roller bearings. He then taught me the need for greater accuracy in our products to meet the exacting standards of interchangeable parts. Mr. Leland came to the industry with a mature experience in general engineering and in gasoline engines, which he had long made for boats. One of his specialties was precision metalwork, which went back to his experience in toolmaking for a federal arsenal during the Civil War, and which he afterward developed in the Brown and Sharpe Company, machine-tool makers of Providence, Rhode Island. It has been called to my attention It has been called to my attention that Eli Whitney, long before, had started the development of interchangeable parts, a fact which suggests a line of descent from Whitney to Leland to the automobile industry.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 20 (in 1964 edition)

War, Parting