We live technologically, with man as the master of nature, man as the engineer, and let anyone who raises his voice against it sto...p using bridges not built by nature.... No electric light bulbs, no engines, no atomic energy, no calculating machines, no anaesthetics--back to the jungle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the... fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced--by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to gove...rn this nation. This difficult effort will be the "moral equivalent of war," except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not to destroy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you ha...ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world. What we eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In New York--whose subway trains in particular have been "tattooed" with a brio and an energy to put our own rude practitioners to... shame--not an inch of free space is spared except that of advertisements.... Even the most chronically dispossessed appear prepared to endorse the legitimacy of the "haves."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine-forest. The English mind disliked the French mind... because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps hostile, but recognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was not a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow, and ignorant; a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical, sharp and direct. The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was either economical, sharp or direct; but the defect that most struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity. Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for sake of the eccentricity itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My idea is that the world outside--the so-called modern world--can only pervert and degrade the conceptions of the primitive insti...nct of art and feeling, and that our only chance is to accept the limited number of survivors--the one- in-a-thousand of born artists and poets--and to intensify the energy of feeling within that radiant centre.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject... of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is economy of his force; the training is partly the clearing away of obstacles, partly the direct application of effort. Once acquired, the tools and models may be thrown away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since I am upon this Subject, I must observe that our English Poets have succeeded much better in the Stile, than in the Sentiment...s of their Tragedies. Their Language is very often noble and sonorous, but the sense either very trifling or very common. On the contrary, in the ancient Tragedies, and indeed in those of Corneille and Racine, tho' the Expressions are very great, it is the Thought that bears them up and swells them. For my own part, I prefer a noble Sentiment that is depressed with homely Language, infinitely before a vulgar one that is blown up with all the Sound and Energy of Expression. Whether this Defect in our Tragedies may arise from Want of Genius, Knowledge, or Experience in the Writers, or from their Compliance with the vicious Taste of their Readers, who are better Judges of the Language than of the Sentiments, and consequently relish the one more than the other, I cannot determine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »