Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of demo...cratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid- twentieth century.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything that was ever to happen to me in the future had its germ or impulse in the conditions of my life on Dover Street. My fr...iendships, my advantages and disadvantages, my gifts, my habits, my ambitions--these were the materials out of which I built my after life, in the open workshop of America. My days in the slums were pregnant with possibilities; it only needed the ripeness of events to make them fruit forth in realities. Steadily as I worked to win America, America advanced to lie at my feet. I was an heir, on Dover Street, awaiting maturity. I was a princess waiting to be led to the throne.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What the South most needs is "peace," and peace depends upon the supremacy of the law. There can be no enduring peace if the const...itutional rights of any portion of the people are habitually disregarded.... All parts of the Constitution are sacred and must be sacredly observed--the parts that are new no less than the parts that are old. The moral and national prosperity of the Southern States can be most effectively advanced by a hearty and generous recognition of the rights of all, by all--a recognition without reserve or exception. With such a recognition fully accorded it will be practicable to promote, by the influence of all the legitimate agencies of the General Government, the efforts of the people of those States to obtain for themselves the blessings of honest and capable local government.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To de-animalize human mentality, to purge it of obsolete evolutionary characteristics, in particular of death,... which foreknowledge terrorizes the contents of skulls with, is the fundamental project of technology;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fa...ll but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced.... Tropical beaches turned into high-priced slums where thousand-room hotels elbowed each other for glimpses of once-famous surf not because those who loved the beaches wanted them there but because enormous jets could bring a million tourists every year--and therefore did.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we choose to be parents, we accept another human being as part of ourselves, and a large part of our emotional selves will st...ay with that person as long as we live. From that time on, there will be another person on this earth whose orbit around us will affect us as surely as the moon affects the tides, and affect us in some ways more deeply than anyone else can. Our children are extensions of ourselves in ways our parents are not, nor our brothers and sisters, nor our spouses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A central theme in the speculative writing on technology of the past century is that forms of technics, like forms of biological l...ife, undergo a process of evolution. With the passage of time, newer and more sophisticated varieties of apparatus, organization, and technique rise to replace older, simpler varieties. New technologies enter into areas of social existence where they had not been previously. Just as Darwin observes that the various species of life on the Galapagos Islands tend to specialize and diversify into particular biological niches, so it is that forms of technology continually spread into fresh areas of social utility. In both number and diversity the kinds of technical artifice available to human societies increase.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of d...estruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The learned professors have been at considerable pains in their attempts to make a distinction between tools and implements on the... one hand, and machinery on the other. Nor have they arrived much of anywhere. The one is continually shading into the other. Here is an ordinary shovel used by a day labourer in a ditch; here is the same shovel with a somewhat thicker handle, containing a pneumatic attachment which is said to improve its digging power; here is a very much larger shovel with curved ends and steel teeth, hitched to an arm that is hitched to a steam engine, which can gobble up a cartload of dirt at one mouthful. Where does the tool stop and the machine begin? A grindstone is widely held to be a primitive tool; a turret lathe is widely held to be a machine. Both spin around. What is the essential difference? The employment of nonhuman power, steam, oil, gas, has been defined as the difference. Well and good. Then everything worked by human hands and legs is a tool only, and bicycles, typewriters, adding machines, sewing machines, foot lathes, clocks, hand-pumps--are not machines. Which is absurd. And what is one to do with treadmills for grinding corn, whose motive power is said by some to be the donkey, and by some the carrot in front of his nose?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »