Industrial Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

In the last few decades, it has become increasingly clear that humanity is facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions. Modern science has developed effective measures that could solve most of the urgent problems in today's world—combat the majority of diseases, eliminate hunger and poverty, reduce the amount of industrial waste, and replace destructive fossil fuels by renewable sources of clean energy. The problems that stand in the way are not of economical or technological nature. The deepest sources of the global crisis lie inside the human personality and reflect the level of consciousness evolution of our species.

That such has been the practical outcome is due to the fact that these enlightened principles of the eighteenth century comprise as their chief article the "natural" right of ownership. The later course of events has decided that the ownership of property in sufficiently large blocks will control the country's industrial system and thereby take over the disposal of the community's net output of product over cost; on which the vested interests live and on which, therefore, the kept classes feed. Hence the chief concern of those gentlemanly national governments that have displaced the dynastic states is always and consistently the maintenance of the rights of ownership and investment.

Thorstein Veblen

Smashing up McDonald's or Starbuck's is pointless. Not that I give a damn about McDonald's or Starbuck's. I don't care whether anyone smashes them up or not. But that is not a revolutionary activity. Even if every fast-food chain in the world were wiped out the techno-industrial system would suffer only minimal harm as a result, since it could easily survive without fast-food chains. When you attack McDonald's or Starbuck's, you are not hitting where it hurts.

Theodore Kaczynski

One of the most significant results of the industrial struggle during the past fifty years has been the creation of a condition of a vast inequality of wealth and income. This inequality is so extreme that it now constitutes one of the chief sources of bitterness and strife in modern life.... not that the poor have been getting poorer but that the number and sizes of great fortunes have increased enormously.

The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards.

It is the big enterprises which occupy the strategic centers. Most small businessmen, independents, professionals and even farmers gain their livelihood largely as suppliers or as distributors for the large enterprises. It is the large enterprises which establish the price and wage policies of the nation. The pattern of union-management relations is set by the contracts drawn between big labor and big business. Governmental regulations grow up to harness and channel the economic power and practice of large enterprise. The personnel policies adopted by the large industry become the models for the entire industrial society.

Delbert C. Miller

The worker who knows the cause of his misery, who understands the make-up of our iniquitous social and industrial system can do more for himself and his kind than Christ and the followers of Christ have ever done for humanity; certainly more than meek patience, ignorance, and submission have done.

Our central argument is that industrial relations practices and outcomes are shaped by the interactions of environmental forces along with the strategic choices and values of American managers, union leaders, workers and public policy decision makers.

Thomas Anton Kochan

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

John Perry Barlow

Yes, yes, I see it all! — an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist — for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?

Miguel de Unamuno

From the facts of distress, as given, and from opinions formed, both as a charity agent and as a Settlement worker, I should not be at all surprised if the number of those in poverty in New York, as well as in other large cities and industrial centers, rarely fell below 25 per cent of all the people.

Robert Hunter (author)

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.

We are the beneficiaries of a life of surpassing service. Wise in wisdom and gentle in gentleness, freedom has many sides and angles. Human slavery has been swept away. With security of personal rights has come security of property rights. The freedom of the human mind is recognized in the right to free speech and free press. The public schools have made education possible for all and ignorance a disgrace. In political affairs, the vote of the humblest has long counted for as much as the vote of the most exalted. We are working towards the day when, in our industrial life, equal honor shall fall to equal endeavor.

Calvin Coolidge

Moving to the forefront of advanced nations is not a choice but a national duty. This requires, among other things, erecting the best industrial property protection systems despite all challenges, particularly in the transition phase that we must endure.

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

Concentration of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have increased substantially since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And the National Academy of Sciences indicates that the increase is due in large part to human activity.

The old Liberal party is drawing to its end. These last two elections, particularly the last, are the Mene Mene Tekel Upharsen of the Liberal banquet. The socialist does not indeed get a majority but while the two old parties are cutting each other's throats, he slips in and will continue to slip in and the encouragement to his party is great. The Liberal party will lose their industrial seats, while the Conservative party, the natural refuge in time of trouble, creams off all who will accept protection.

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery

A drastic reduction in weapons competition following a general release from the commitment to the Cold War would be sharply in conflict with the needs of the industrial system.

John Kenneth Galbraith

I am naturally anti-Russian just as most Germans are. I admire their achievements in industrial fields. I was in Moscow personally. I would not be in favor of the Russian system in the western nations. I don't condemn the system — I recognize the good results that it has produced in its proper setting. But in order to be Communist, one must be a fanatic. I am very suspicious of all systems requiring fanaticism. I am convinced that the world would be a better place if people were satisfied with enough to eat and a job to keep them occupied.

The development of the Watt governor for steam engines, which adapted the power output of the engine automatically to the load by means of feedback, consolidated the first Industrial Revolution.

Anthony Stafford Beer

If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total depression.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

Subliminal perception is a subject that virtually no one wants to believe exists, and - if it does exist - they much less believe that it has any practical application.... The techniques are in widespread use by media, advertising and public relations agencies, industrial and commercial corporations, and by the Federal government itself.

Wilson Bryan Key

The people who believe that, as a result of industrial development, life is about to become a hell, or may be one already, are guilty, at least, of sloppy pronouncements. On page 8 of Earth in the Balance, Al Gore claims that his study of the arms race gave him "a deeper appreciation for the most horrifying fact in all our lives: civilization is now capable of destroying itself." In the first place, the most horrifying fact in many of our lives is that our ex-spouse has gotten ahold of our ATM card. And civilization has always been able to destroy itself. The Greeks of ancient Athens, who had a civilization remarkable for lack of technological progress during its period of greatest knowledge and power, managed to destroy them fine.

Our government has the weirdest bias against cannabis. There's no reason for everybody to be so afraid of it. It's not the antichrist the DEA makes it out to be. Industrial hemp is a very useful plant. I challenged the attorney general to get rid of the criminal stigma associated with hemp so we can look at it in terms of how it might be useful. And government has no business telling us what we can and can't use for pain relief.

The wealth gathered by Jamsetji Tata and his sons in half a century of industrial pioneering formed but a minute fraction of the amount by which they enriched the nation. The whole of that wealth is held in trust for the people and used exclusively for their benefit. The cycle is thus complete; what came from the people has gone back to the people many times over.