I have seen in my time two enormous extensions of the suffrage to men--one in America and one in England. But neither the negroes ...in the South nor the agricultural laborers in Great Britain had shown before they got the ballot any capacity of government; for they had never had the opportunity to take the first steps of political action. Very different has been the history of the march of women toward a recognized position in the State. We have had to prove our ability at each stage of progress, and have gained nothing without having satisfied a test of capacity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like nuclear power, genetic engineering is not a neutral technology. It is by its very nature too powerful for our present state o...f social and scientific development, no matter whose hands are controlling it. Just as we would say, especially after Chernobyl, that a nuclear power plant is just as dangerous in a socialist nation as it is in a capitalist one, so I would say the same thing for genetic engineering. It is inherently Eugenic in that it always requires someone to decide what is a good and a bad gene.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women think that an engineer is a man in hip boots building a dam. They don't realize that 95 percent of engineering is done in a ...nice air-conditioned office.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Next week Reagan will probably announce that American scientists have discovered that the entire U.S. agricultural surplus can be ...compacted into a giant tomato one thousand miles across, which will be suspended above the Kremlin from a cluster of U.S. satellites flying in geosynchronous orbit. At the first sign of trouble the satellites will drop the tomato on the Kremlin, drowning the fractious Muscovites in ketchup.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mining today is an affair of mathematics, of finance, of the latest in engineering skill. Cautious men behind polished desks in Sa...n Francisco figure out in advance the amount of metal to a cubic yard, the number of yards washed a day, the cost of each operation. They have no need of grubstakes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In academic science, interdisciplinary work is productive and praised, but is relatively rare. Scientists don't need to cooperate ...to have their results fit together: they are all describing different parts of the same thing--nature--so in the long run, their results tend to come together into a single picture. Engineering, however, is different. Because it is more creative (it actually creates complex things), it demands more attention to teamwork. If the finished parts are going to work together, they must be developed by groups that share a common picture of what each part must accomplish. Engineers in different disciplines are forced to communicate; the challenge of management and team-building is to make that communication happen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original i...deas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think the people over here are coming to realize what would happen if Germany and Italy won a European war. We would be out of t...he picture entirely.... If I were a German conqueror what would I do? Obviously I would have the British navy out of the way and the French army out of the way.... The first thing I would do is look around and say, "What outside territories do I want to take for myself?"... We are not quite ready to take on the United States but we can do it by indirection very nicely. We are going to dominate South America ... without violating the Monroe Doctrine. [FDR set forth a scenario of economic domination of Latin America by giving Argentina a choice of agreeing to German domination of its army by economic blackmail by virtue of the fact that Germany controlled all the agricultural markets in Europe on which Argentina depended for livelihood and the same for Brazil.] It is a perfectly open and shut thing and, if you have the complete, physical power to do it, you win.... [F]rom Hitler's point of view, it is rational. And, if any of us were in his place, with his methods, we would do it. I made myself a hump-back, dyed my skin in several places with great spots of yellow; so that, when I look'd in the glass, I was almost frighten'd at my own figure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The War of the Roses in England and the Civil War in America were both intestinal conflicts arising out of similar ideas. In the f...irst the clash was between feudalism and the new economic order; in the second, between an agricultural society and a new industrial one. Both led to similar ends; the first to the founding of the English nation, and the second to the founding of the American. Both were strangely interlinked; for it was men of the old military and not of the new economic mind--men, such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh--who founded the English colonies in America.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »