George Bernard Shaw Quotes
For four wicked centuries the world has dreamed this foolish dream of efficiency; and the end is not yet. But the end will come.
Shaw, George Bernard. John Bull's Other Island. Archibald Constable & Co., 1907.
Chekov was distancing himself from the views of many of the Russian religious leaders and writers like Tolstoy who saw salvation and reform coming from religious virtue. Chekov was prescient enough to see the potential of technology in improving the human condition. Russia was then technologically backward and religion was one of the leading forces blocking technological development, education, and reform. This was one of the reasons that the Russian Revolutionaries were hostile to religion which had not only supported the Czar and the aristocracy but also kept modernism and technology out of Russian life. The situation was not unlike the role of Islamic leaders in Muslim countries one hundred years later.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Ford, an inveterate racist and anti-Semitic in his old age was very liberal when he first started and accomplished so much. He not only hired foreigners, but also some men of his initial workforce were handicapped. He was proud of the fact that jobs could be created on his concept of an assembly line that was so specialized that handicapped people could be productive workers as they did not have to do everything in the manufacturing process. Since the assembly line did the moving, men who had trouble walking could sit and be very productive at some tasks. Further, Ford did not try and pay his assembly line workers less than the going wage because their skills could be much narrower. He actually doubled the salaries (see {642361}) and picked men who were not wed to the older, traditional way of manufacturing things. The productivity came from the engineering of the cars and the assembly line, not be cutting wages, a practice that he did not continue as he grew older and tried to make his money the traditional way of exploiting the workers more. When the other auto companies had recognized the union, the elder Ford would not.
George Bernard Shaw, known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
