Quotes About Industrialization

When the industrial colonialists and the politicians agree to sacrifice a region to a single economic goal, they inevitably sacrifice the people as well.

This view of farming has been dominant now for a generation, and so it is not too soon to ask: How well does it work? We must answer that it works as any industrial machine works: very "efficiently" according to the terms of an extremely specialized accounting. That is to say that it apparently makes it possible for about 4 percent of the population to "feed" the rest.

From time to time Eva would venture on deck to gaze at the grey sky,the grey turbulent water and the grey ships with their belching smoke stacks butting and smashing onward through the waves and jagged swells - disappearing in explosions of wintry spume from time to time - gamely making for the British Isles

The factory might have given us the millionfold productivity increases that yielded the Industrial Revolution, but it achieved those gains by chaining us to machines, deskilling the artisan and turning him into a cog in the factory, stripped of judgment and dignity and disconnected from the rhythms of his spirit and the world around him.

The middle classes, grown prosperous by the belated but staggering development of the industrial revolution and dazzled by the success of Bismarck's policy of force and war, had traded for material gain any aspirations for political freedom they may have had.

the ultra laissez-faire industrialization pursued by the Franco regime,

I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!

Hitherto, it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. John Stuart Mill.

still often try to maintain a deeply cogitative silence about the unprecedented tempo of Russia's industrial development, or confine themselves to remarks about an extreme "exploitation of the peasantry." They are missing a wonderful opportunity to explain why the brutal exploitation of the peasants in China, for instance, or Japan, or India, never produced an industrial tempo remotely approaching that of the Soviet Union.

On the eve of the war, when tsarist Russia had attained the highest point of its prosperity, the national income per capita was eight to ten times less than in the United States—a fact which is not surprising when you consider that four-fifths of the self-supporting population of Russia was occupied with agriculture, while in the United States, for every one engaged in agriculture, two and one-half were engaged in industry.

In the developed industrial countries, all social institutions for the purpose of evening out inequalities and ensuring a minimum of security (progressive taxation, health services, unemployment relief, price controls, etc.) have been created and extended at the price of a vastly expanded state bureaucracy, and no one can suggest how to avoid paying this price.

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.

What I would suggest is that the most important agent in effecting the change from a decentralized village economy to a highly organized urban economy, was the king, or rather, the institution of Kingship. The industrialization and commercialization we now associate with urban growth was for centuries a subordinate phenomenon probably even emerging later in time :

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.

The industrial revolution allowed us, for the first time, to start replacing human labour with machines.

My great grandfather emigrated from Italy, and my grandfather worked in a steel mill and was able to raise kids and have a family and go on vacation.

I would be absolutely astounded if population growth and industrialisation and all the stuff we are pumping into the atmosphere hadn't changed the climatic balance. Of course it has. There is no valid argument for denial.

he waited until 1896 to build the first truck.

The parallel between these animals sick from surplus value and humans sick from industrial concentration is illuminating. (...) Against the industrial organization of death, animals have no other recourse, no other possible defiance, except suicide.

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?

I visited a manufactory in Manchester with my father. I saw that the wretched creatures enslaved to the machines were as repetitive in their movements as machines. They were distinguished only by their unhappiness. The great wealth of the manufactories is not for the workers but for the owners. Humans must live in misery to be the mind of the machines.

The better shaped his product, the more misshapen the worker.

The German people were not denied, however, the possibility of improving their lot by hard work over the years. Industrial growth and progress were not denied them.