Arnold J. Toynbee Quotes

Industrial forces set in motion by steam and electricity have materially changed the structure of our civilization.

...industrialisation took centuries, rather than decades

The industrial revolution turned time into a commodity.

The Industrial Revolution was another of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization.

In Victorian England, laborers were pushed off the farms, replaced by steam power.

The essence of the Industrial Revolution was the substitution of competition for the medieval regulations which had previously controlled the production and distribution of wealth.

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production.

Industrialization based on machinery, already referred to as a characteristic of our age, is but one aspect of the revolution that is being wrought by technology.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the industrial-financial revolution began.

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

It's the Industrial Revolution and the growth of urban concentrations that led to a sense of anonymity.

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

Instruments, machines, looms will increasingly supplement the strength and skill of men; will augment at the same time the perfection and the precision of manufactures by lessening both the time and the labor needed to produce them

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

When water power then steam power were harnessed to spin and weave cloth, a cottage craft turned into an industry overnight.

Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station. And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books.

Instead of the scream of a fish hawk scaring the fishes, is heard the whistle of the steam-engine, arousing a country to its progress.

If England became a world power, it was because of the industrial revolution.

The industrial age was not about craftspeople trading peer to peer. It was about stopping that. You weren't supposed to be a craftsperson, you were supposed to be an employee.

In the Machine Age, the company itself became a machine - a machine for making money.

The era of industrial Britain, where a large section of our workforce provided cheap labour in factories and processing goods, is over.

In short, industrialism is over.

The industrial revolution that defined the first half of the 20 century marked the start of modern business, typified by high-volume, large-scale organizations. Mechanization created a culture of business derived from the capabilities and needs of the time.

Steam and the telegraph and other machinery have required capital greater than any individual can furnish.

We have a few great engineers and mechanics, and a large body of clever workmen; but the Americans seem likely to become a whole nation of such people. Already, their rivers swarm with steamboats; their valleys are becoming crowded with factories; their towns, surpassing those of every state of Europe, except Belgium, Holland, and England, are the abodes of all the skill which now distinguishes a town population; and there is scarcely an art [occupation and craft] in Europe not carried on in America with equal or greater skill than in Europe, though it has been here cultivated and improved through ages.