Industrialization Quotes

“I wish I could tell you how lonely I am. How cold and harsh it is here. Everywhere there is conflict and unkindness. I think God has forsaken this place. I believe I have seen hell and it's white, it's snow-white.”
― Sandy Welch

“The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

“I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.... I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape -- but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community -- to society?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

“Yes, it's vital to make lifestyle choices to mitigate damage caused by being a member of industrialized civilization, but to assign primary responsibility to oneself, and to focus primarily on making oneself better, is an immense copout, an abrogation of responsibility.”
― Derrick Jensen

“Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars. With the Model T, part of the concept of private property disappeared. Pliers ceased to be privately owned and a tire pump belonged to the last man who had picked it up. Most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born in them. The theory of the Anglo Saxon home became so warped that it never quite recovered.”
― John Steinbeck

“Eating is an agricultural act," Wendell Berry famously wrote, by which he meant that we are not just passive consumers of food but cocreators of the systems that feed us. Depending on how we spend them, our food dollars can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity and convenience and "value" or they can nourish a food chain organized around values--values like quality and health. Yes, shopping this way takes more money and effort, but as soon as you begin to treat that expenditure not just as shopping but also as a kind of vote--a vote for health in the largest sense--food no longer seems like the smartest place to economize.”
― Michael Pollan

“The whole discussion now underway on revolutionary forms in Russia and in China boils down to the judgement to be made of the historical phenomenon of the "appearance" of industrialism and mechanisation in huge areas of the world previously dominated by landed and precapitalist forms of production.

Constructing industrialism and mechanising things is supposedly the same as building socialism whenever central and "national" plans are made. This is the mistaken thesis.”
― Amadeo Bordiga, Murdering the Dead: Amadeo Bordiga on Capitalism and Other Disasters

“The incommensurability between the modern economic system and the people who staff it explains why modern workers have so often been depicted as 'cogs' in the larger 'machinery' of industrial civilization; for while the practical rationalization of enterprise does require workers to be consistent, predictable, precise, uniform, and even to a certain extent creative, it does not really require them to be persons, that is, to live examined lives, to grow, to develop character, to search for truth, to know themselves, etc.”
― Craig M. Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It's Tempting to Live As If God Doesn't Exist

“The Western industrial complex would not change even if millions of people perished in Africa or India or some other faraway place. The population of the earth increases by millions every month, and such losses would be seen as a little drop in the ocean. But if something serious were to occur in the West, then that would turn upside down the currently held vision of Western people with regard to the impact of modern technology on nature. It would be something that would wake them up and perhaps help to stop this really suicidal course that modern civilization is currently pursuing and that the rest of the world is trying to follow.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, در جست‌وجوی امر قدسي

“China’s achievement of First World standards will approximately double the entire world’s human resource use and environmental impact. But it is doubtful whether even the world’s current human resource use and impact can be sustained. Something has to give way.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Our primary emphasis isn’t on physics and chemistry; it’s on the sciences of life.”
“Is that a matter of principle?”
“Not entirely. It’s also a matter of convenience and economic necessity. We don’t have the money for large-scale research in physics and chemistry, and we don’t really have any practical need for that kind of research—no heavy industries to be made more competitive, no armaments to be made more diabolical, not the faintest desire to land on the backside of the moon. Only the modest ambition to live as fully human beings in harmony with the rest of life on this island at this latitude on this planet. We can take the results of your researches in physics and chemistry and apply them, if we want to or can afford it, to our own purposes. Meanwhile we’ll concentrate on the research which promises to do us the greatest good—in the sciences of life and mind.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“think how nine-tenths, aye, I do not know but ninety-nine hundredths of all our vital powers are spent in a mere effort to get a living; or to heap together that which we cannot by any possibility take away. Take the life of the average workingman. Is that the life for which the human brain was intended and the human heart was made? Look at the factories scattered through our country. They are little better than penitentiaries.”
― Henry George, Progress and Poverty

“Οι αριστοκράτες έφευγαν για πιο ευχάριστα μέρη, όπου μπορούσαν να ξοδεύουν το χρήμα τους, χωρίς να βλέπουν πώς βγαίνει. Αυτά έχει η ιστορία. Η μια Αγγλία ξεπαστρεύει την άλλη… Η καινούργια Αγγλία σβήνει την παλιά Αγγλία και η συνέχεια δεν είναι οργανική, παρά μηχανική.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“Lecz teraz nie mam ani chwili do stracenia. Nie ma tu wytchnienia, nie ma cienia drżących liści ani altany, w której można by się schronić przed słońcem, usiąść z ukochaną na wieczornym chłodzie.

(...) To jest życie - Pan Prentice o czwartej, Pan Eyres o czwartej czterdzieści
(...) Brzemię świata spoczywa na naszych barkach. To jest życie. Jeśli będę parł do przodu, odziedziczę fotel i dywan, posiadłość w Surrey ze szklarniami i jakimś niezwykłym okazem drzewa szpilkowego, melona albo kwitnącego drzewa, którego będą mi zazdrościli inni handlowcy”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“To be cut off, to be left solitary; to have a world alien, not your world; all a hostile camp for you; not a home at all of hearts and faces who are yours, whose you are! It is the frightfullest enchantment; too truly a work of the Evil One. To have neither superior, nor inferior, nor equal, united manlike to you. Without father, without child, without brother. Man knows no sadder destiny.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present

“What was atrocious was the fact that, like every other building in the new towns, they were dumped almost at random; the leakage of escaping gas scented the so-called gas-house districts, and not surprisingly these districts frequently became among the most degraded sections of the city. Towering above the town, polluting its air, the gas tanks symbolized the dominance of 'practical' interests over life-needs.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“Earth has plenty resources to suffice our need, but no planet has enough resources to suffice our greed.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work

“If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

“So long as greed drives the industries, it's not industrialization, it is vandalization.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Ingan Impossible: Handbook of Hatebusting

“In 1917, Milton Hershey began work on a sugar mill town outside the city of Santa Cruz, Cuba, which he named Hershey and which, when finished, included American-style bungalows, luxurious houses for staff, schools, a hospital, a baseball diamond, and a number of movie theaters. At the height of the banana boom of the 1920s, one could tour Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, Cuba, and Colombia and not for a moment leave United Fruit Company property, traveling on its trains and ships, passing through its ports, staying in its many towns, with their tree-lined streets and modern amenities, in a company hotel or guest house, playing golf on its links, taking in a Hollywood movie in one of its theaters, and being tended to in its hospital if sick.”
― Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

“With superior sentience, come superior screw-ups. And this holds particularly true for industrialization. Even if we put aside carbon emission, in the year 2020 alone humankind has produced over 2 billion tonnes of trash, which is expected to rise over 70% by the year 2050.

Thus, in the name of progress we the gadget-mad gargoyles keep acting as the true eco-terrorists of the glorious dumping ground, called the planet earth. 2% of all our waste is e-waste. And the alarming bit here is that, that 2% e-waste comprises over 70% of our overall toxic waste.

So, what can you do, you ask? Simple - reject less, repair more. Try to make things last as long as possible, or pass them on to those who have need for them. Don't let things go to waste, just because you can afford new ones.

For example, my kid cousin's laptop has been acting up for some time now. But instead of buying them a new pc, I ordered the replacement for the faulty part and repaired the laptop myself. This way, we not only reduce our e-waste footprint on the planet, but in the process, we teach kids to value things.

The point is, whether you do it yourself or get it done by a professional, by practicing repair, you are actively participating in the making of a greener, cleaner and healthier world.

It's not enough to be just a consumer, you gotta be a conscious consumer, otherwise there is no difference between a consumer and a slave. That is why, right-to-repair is not only a human rights issue, it is also an environmental issue. Repairing and recycling are the bedrock of sustainability. So I say again - reject less, repair more.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament

“In short, the Industrial Revolution was actually a combination of technological, economical, scientific and social transformations that rapidly and radically altered the course of history and reconfigured the face of the planet in less than ten generations -a true blink of an eye by the standards of evolutionary time.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“Nuts and bolts do not constitute advancement,
Heart and help constitute true advancement.
Freezers are good for preserving dead meat,
To preserve life we need a warm environment.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission

“Humanitarian Industrialization

Fourth industrial revolution my eye! We haven't yet recovered from the disparities produced by the first, second and third industrial revolutions. Morons keep peddling cold and pompous dreams devoid of humanity, and morons keep consuming them like good little backboneless vermin. Grow a backbone already!

We always look at the glorious aspects of industrialization and overlook all those countless lives that are ruined by it. But it's okay! As long as we are not struck by a catastrophe ourselves, our sleep of moronity never breaks - so long as our comfort is unchallenged, and enhanced rather, it's okay if millions keep falling through the cracks.

So long as you can afford a smartphone that runs smooth like butter, it doesn't matter if it is produced by modern day slave labors who can't even afford the basic essentials of living. With all the revenue the tech companies earn by charging you a thousand dollar for a hundred dollar smartphone, they can't even pay decent wages to the people working their butt off to manufacture their assets - because apparently, it is more important for the people at the top to afford private jets and trips to space, than the factory workers to afford healthcare, housing and a couple of square meals a day.

And this you call industrialization - well done - you just figured out the secret to glory without being bothered by something so boring as basic humanity.

I say to you here and now, listen well - stop abusing revolutionary scientific discoveries in the making of a cold, mechanistic, disparity infested world - use science and technology to wipe out the disparities, not cause them. Break free from your modern savagery of inhuman industrialization, and focus your mind on humanitarian industrialization.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Centurion Sermon: Mental Por El Mundo

“And Tracy was young, just twenty, still wet behind the ears, and the old blinders were on him so he couldn't really see what was around and he believed the bull about freedomofopportunity and a chancetorise and ifyoureallywanttoworkyoucanalwaysfindajob and ruggedindividualism and something about pursuitofhappiness.”
― Tillie Olsen

“Once industrialisation ocurred, non-communicable (chronic) diseases (NCDs; e.g., cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cardio-vascular, and non-infectious respiratory diseases) started to rise and replace infections. Tobacco use, physical inactivity, unhealthy diets and the harmful use of alcohol are key risk factors for NCDs.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Driving along the highway from the airport, they had passed mile upon mile of grain elevators, marking the most productive land in Mexico, but when they reached the place where Google Maps said the river should be, there was nothing but a dusty, toxic-looking trickle. The river — that great, fertile river that the first Spaniards had compared to the Nile — had been dammed long ago, diverted by a huge aqueduct to the factories in Hermosillo and Ciudad Obregón, and all that remained in the traditional villages was polluted, unsafe for irrigation or to drink.”
― Anna Hope, The White Rock

“Aim for exponential progress, and sooner or later you'll regret it.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Dervis Vadisi: 100 Promissory Sonnets

“Almost overnight, Soviet peasants needed to become factory workers and miners. Industrialization was to be financed by domestic means, given the absence of any meaningful foreign investments in the country; this meant that the peasantry that did not join the industrial workforce had to foot much of the bill. Herding them into collective farms seemed a promising way to force them to pay this bill. Stalin would state, not long after he unleashed the full brunt of his modernization program, that the Soviet Union was at least half a century behind the industrialized world, and needed to catch up with it within a decade. Every sacrifice toward this goal was justified. This, then, was the broader context in which Soviet daily life played itself out between 1928 and 1933.”
― Kees Boterbloem, Life in Stalin's Soviet Union