"If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn't know ahead of time who you were going to be — what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you'd be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you'd be born into — you wouldn't choose 100 years ago. You wouldn't choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You'd choose right now."
1w ago
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
4w ago
It is not the conscious innovations of men of learning or genius that really transform a civilization: it is the unconscious innovations of the anonymous multitude.
1mo ago
Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.
1mo ago
We must not measure greatness from the mansion down, but from the manger up. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
2mo ago
The historical examples it cites simply don't support a narrative of out-of-touch technologists inventing the wrong sorts of technologies and hurting workers in the process. The book embraces a highly questionable definition of 'power' in which persuasion in an open democratic society is painted as a threat.
2mo ago
The past has become more valuable than the future to many Americans; they cling desperately to the power to enforce stasis, preserving a facade of the country they grew up in at the expense of the very dynamism that made that country great.
2mo ago
Two hundred and fifty years seems like a long time, but it's just three peoples' lifetimes at current averages. It would have been six lifetimes back then, except the average American's life expectancy has doubled over the past 250 years.
2mo ago
We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and now the machine is reinventing us.
3mo ago
We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, but we have not invented a sufficient control of the machine; and worst of all, we have not invented any adequate philosophy of the machine.
3mo ago
The mind has not merely made a discovery of external fact; it has altered its own nature. It has become capable of rising above the present and the particular to the conception of law, of growth, of progress.
4mo ago
We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and now the machine is bent on inventing us.
4mo ago
We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and now the machine is in the process of reinventing us.
4mo ago
The one thing we ask is that the man who is not thinking should get out of the way of the man who is. The world wants to move forward, and if you're not moving with it, you're holding it back.
6mo ago
If the people in that room succeed, America's next 250 years will be better than its first 250.
6mo ago
Through them, the documentary poses quiet, hard questions about what industrialization means, what progress costs, and how China — as a manufacturing power — shapes the experience of modernization in African nations.
6mo ago
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is not to arrive at immutable truths but to develop progressively better approximations of reality.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
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