John Ruskin Quotes

DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)

From leading the world into the age of democracy to spearheading the technological revolution, America has always been at the forefront of greatness.

Just think how much poorer we would be today if the world would have had half as many people in the 19th century as it actually did. You can get rid of Thomas Edison or Louis Pasteur; take your pick.

The true epic of our times is not "Arm's and the Man," but "Tools and the Man"--an infinitely wider kind of epic.

[The daguerreotype] itself must undoubtedly be regarded as the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science.

In the 18th century, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same.

Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers.

There is every indication that the period ahead will be an innovative one, one of rapid change in technology , society , economy , and institutions .

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

Science has grown frightfully audacious in these days -- swift-footed, ponderous, careering over her iron ways with unslacking pace. This rampant dragon, on which I am mounted, see how he bends his once stiff neck to his rider, champing his checked bit and pawing the dust, impatient to leap around the globe. Genius is prescient, foresees its own might. Man is striving through these iron-ribbed, steam-sped hippogriffs, to recover his lost ubiquity and omnipotence, and threatens soon to grasp in his ample palm, and fix with flaming eye-ball, the elemental forces!

Technology is closing the gap between what one can imagine and what one can do and as a result the equality of opportunity is unmatched in human history.

Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves.

Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!

Technology by default became the thing that was a new thing that had swept in and was altering it everything.

Technology changes nothing.

It's us fun being a horse when the tractor comes along, or the blacksmith when the car comes along.

The Six Faces of the future are: Fast, Urban, Tribal, Universal, Radical and Ethical.

Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.

The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.

The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?

Humans change themselves through technology.

But the broader lesson of the first Industrial Revolution is more like the Indy 500 than John Henry: economic progress comes from constant innovation in which people race with machines. Human and machine collaborate together in a race to produce more, to capture markets, and to beat other teams of humans and machines.

We live in an extraordinary time. We are caught up in a pace of social and technological change that makes our work, our business and education, sources of anxiety and unfulfillment. Thinking about our thinking and observing our observations can bring us a new world in which work becomes a place for innovation, and in which peace, wisdom, friendship, companionship and community can exist. Let us design this world together.

Progress? It ought to be stopped, that's what I say. If the Lord meant chickens to come out of incubators he'd never have made hens, it stands to reason.

The automobile, practical since 1906, was proceeding to disintegrate and stamp anew the pattern of communication, manners, and city life in the United States, by 1918; before long, men would begin to see that the automobile, and the mass production techniques which made its possible, could alter the national character and morality more thoroughly than could the most absolute of tyrants. As a mechanical Jacobin, it rivaled the dynamo. The productive process which made these vehicles cheap was still more subversive of the old ways than was the gasoline engine itself.