civilization
In a way everything is technology. Not only the rapid changes we are quick to label revolutions, but also the long slow improvements in processes and tools.
- Fernand Braudel
Technologists lacking scientific background have a habit of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
- Joseph Needham
Journalists do a better job of covering revolution than evolution.
- James Reston
The fundamental rule of technological progress: if something can be done, it probably will be done, and possibly already has been.
- Edward Snowden
A new device merely opens the door, it does not compel anyone to enter.
- Lynn White
The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone.
- Sheikh Zaki Yamani
Napoleon moved no faster than Julius Caesar.
- Paul Valéry
All the vibrations of economic life can be grasped through the special case of the metallurgical industry: it sums up everything and paved the way for all that follows.
- Stefan Kurowski
When iron succeeded in becoming the most important production material, it was the event of events in the evolution of humanities.
- Lewis Morgan
Everything that’s not grimy is supported by coal.
- George Orwell
Coal stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back to the laborious poverty of early times.
- W. S. Jevons
If there should be a WW3, it would have to be fought with someone else’s petroleum, because the United States won’t have it.
- Harold Ickes
It is commonplace in military history that there exists a continuity between the closing phase of one war and the opening phase of the next.
- Isaac Deuscher
In every civilization technical knowhow has manifested itself above all in relation to warfare.
- Jürgen Osterhammer
Our most critical vulnerability is the electrical supply, upon which all other layers of modern society’s technological infrastructure depend.
- Andy Greenberg
The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union. It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances.
- Ed Hirs
We must catch up morally and internationally with the machine age. We must catch up with it… in such a way as to create peace in the world, or it will destroy us and everyone else. And that we don’t dare contemplate.
- Harry Truman
Where labor is dear, it must be supplemented by machines; this is the only way to compete with those countries where it is cheap.
- Marc Bloch
Our country used to build shit.
- Frank Sabadka
Our nation was built of White Pine, literally and figuratively.
- Donald Culross Peattie
Canal construction was the grim material foundation of the rise of the United States.
- Jurgen Osterhammel
I envisioned that a group of professionals from The East would come along by and by to tell us how networking was supposed to be done. We had this sort of magical view of The East.
- Steve Crocker
The internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime, and for hundreds of years.
- Rupert Murdoch
Of all the watchdogs, the FCC seems the most eager to sit up and beg or roll over and play dead at the command of Congress.
- Drew Pearson
A feature isn’t real until it’s been exploited.
- Joe Uhl
Software often grows to use the hardware you give it.
- Drew Devault
Flight is but a temporary escape from the eternal custody of the Earth.
- Beryl Markham
The history of Capitalism is the subordination of the country to the town.
- Leon Trotsky
A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea.
- Benjamin Disraeli
The city is a granite garden, composed of many smaller gardens, set in a garden world.
- Anne Spirn
In cities - where people’s lives are denser, endlessly intertwined, hopelessly snarled tangles of aspirations and antagonisms - hopes and fears and dreams and dreads follow the same.
- Robert Caro
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. Wilderness was never a homogeneous raw material. It was very diverse, and the resulting artifacts are very diverse. These differences in the end-product are known as cultures. The rich diversity of the world’s cultures reflect a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.
- Aldo Leopold
The same logic that causes big rivers always to flow past big cities causes cheap farms sometimes to be marooned by spring floods.
- Aldo Leopold
The Earth is a generous mother. She will provide in plentiful abundance food for all her children, if they will but cultivate her soil in justice and peace.
- Bourke Cockran
Mankind progresses from East to West.
- Henry David Thoreau
Better to have one bad general than two good ones.
- Napoleon
Strategy is the art of making use of space and time.
- Napoleon
The whole art of war consists in getting at what lies on the other side of the hill. In deciding what we do not know from what we do.
- Duke of Wellington
War is movement.
- Napoleon
The secret of war lies in attacking the enemy lines of communication.
- Napoleon
Wars are not won by fancy tactics. Only simple and direct measures have any chance at all.
- George Marshall
How willingly would I have exchanged a full-scale invasion for this shapeless, measureless peril, expressed in charts, curves, and statistics.
- Winston Churchill
Stadtluft macht frei.
- Medieval German saying