Quotes About Modernization

Everywhere were metastasizing telephone lines, riots of electric wires, laundry hanging from prefabricated apartment windows like tears from idiot eyes.

Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy, as well as the number of processes we have to engage in and think about, for each of us to obtain the necessities of life.

Compared with the 20 million motorcars in the United States, cars and trucks in the Soviet Union numbered perhaps 5,500

The world has changed dramatically since The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was first published. Life is more complex, more stressful, more demanding. We have transitioned from the Industrial

Democracy was expendable. Money could still be made. China needed capital from the West to fuel its modernization on the mainland.

The resulting progress is astounding, outstripping our ability to appreciate the multifarious changes. Some 200 years ago the average human lifespan in the United States was 37 years; it now approaches 88! About 100 years ago, an American farmer could feed on average just four others; today, it is 200! Fifty years ago the Oxford English Dictionary weighed 300 pounds and took up 4 feet of shelf space; today, it fits on a 1-ounce flash drive or can be accessed via the Web from virtually anywhere!

It is hard for those of us who have lived in the postindustrial world our entire lives to understand just how much a shock the sound of industrialization was to human ears a century or two ago.

That thrust was now being expressed in new forms, based on steel-frame construction, which allowed newspaper offices and insurance buildings to rise above the towering spire of Trinity Church; and Martin imagined great structures hundreds of stories high, each a city in itself, rising across the land.

2011, more than 95 percent of American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV.58 (A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.)

As Europe became more urban, cosmopolitan, commercial, industrialized, and secular, it got safer and safer.

A dollar today, no matter how heroically adjusted for inflation, buys far more betterment of life than a dollar yesterday. It buys things that didn't exist, like refrigeration, electricity, toilets, vaccinations, telephones, contraception, and air travel, and it transforms things that do exist, such as a party line patted by a switchboard operator to a smartphone with unlimited talk time.

If the pie we were dividing in 1700 was baked in a standard nine-inch pan, then the one we have today would be more than ten feet in diameter.

Ecomodernists point out that organic farming, which needs far more land to produce a kilogram of food, is neither green nor sustainable.)

We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.

In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes.17

century, the amount of life that people lost to housework—which, not surprisingly, people say is their least favorite way to spend their time—fell almost fourfold, from 58 hours a week in 1900 to 15.5 hours in 2011.13 Time spent on laundry alone fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to 1.5 in 2014.14 For returning "washday" to our lives, Hans Rosling suggests, the washing machine deserves to be called the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution.

Your mother's recipe for fish heads and rice, no matter how celebrated in her village of origin, doesn't cut it in these days of grapefruit foam and Scotch/tobacco ice-cream.

For one thing, we're doing publishing wrong.

He'd taken to the BlackBerry right away, even though he complained that his fingers were too thick for the Lilliputian keys.

Man, I think you're actually proud of being a Luddite.

City-sized shopping malls were erected in the blink of an eye, and storefronts spread across planets like time-lapse footage of mold devouring an orange.

Newer, faster, or more versatile components were always being released, so I was constantly spending large chunks of my meager income on upgrades.

Il fuit ce monde qui efface les siècles des montagnes pour les mettre sous les roues des chemins de fer. (p. 76)

We expect one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide, and we live twice as long.