Pierre Schaeffer Quotes

We have to realize that science is a double-edged sword. One edge of the sword can cut against poverty, illness, disease and give us more democracies, and democracies never war with other democracies, but the other side of the sword could give us nuclear proliferation, biogerms and even forces of darkness.

I know about technology, about research, scientific applications, culture, civilization, differences between nations of the world, the nature of history.

We live in this era that has benefited from the Industrial Revolution, and we live with a kind of luxury and plenty that even all but the poorest of Americans live with a kind of sensuousness that was unimagined by medieval kings. But in order to get to this point, a lot of people had to suffer in really terrible ways.

The world is very different today than it was in 1968.

Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.

The world is rapidly changing - and with it, we face new global challenges.

People have looked at all sorts of effects of globalization and blamed trade. But it's lots of things.

In this post-industrial society, when we're moving away from what was the norm, we have to deal with what it has left in its wake in terms of the impact on people and the environment.

today's children are the first generation to grow up in a world that has the power to destroy itself.

The gap between brute power and human need continues to grow, as the power fattens on the same faulty technology that intensifies the need.

Corporate globalists and the corporate empires they serve may be at the cutting edge of technological innovation, but socially and environmentally they are relics of a bygone era of imperial colonial rule, elite privilege, and state-sanctioned plunder.

Since the war [WWII], the world has been rushing forward at an unprecedented and exhilarating speed … Yet Britain lags behind, lacking the will or the plan which can bring this future within the reach of us all.

I feel like the world that ' Condor' lives in is very close to the world we're all living in every day.

The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.

'The UnAmericans' is a compassionate and brilliantly rendered debut - and for a book set largely in the past, these stories feel essential to understanding the contemporary world in which we live.

It's true that globalization, with all its fantastic improvements in the world and the technological progress linked to it, has increased inequality at country level, especially inside countries. And there are people that were left behind - people, sectors, regions - that has created a sense of frustration in the rust belts of the world.

You look at the Americans. They don't lack fervour in moral causes. They promote democracy, freedom of speech, women's rights, gay rights, sometimes even transgender rights. But you don't see them applying that universally across the world with all their allies.

History suggests that economic upheavals such as the Industrial and Information Revolutions eventually play themselves out and leave the entire world better off.

I enjoy thinking about how race plays out over the centuries, how technology evolves, how cities transform themselves. These subjects are present in some of my books and absent in others.

Kissinger's unusually high body count and singular moral imperiousness has the effect, among his critics, of obscuring his didactic utility. An outsized personality who has committed outsized mayhem, Kissinger eclipses his own context. Yet, as animals were to the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Kissinger is good to think with.

As populations continue to increase, and the climate continues to deteriorate, and as people flock in ever increasing numbers to large, underdeveloped cities, the threat of multiple protracted mega-emergencies has become reality.

Regardless of politics, our world will continue to change rapidly.

While the digital transformation of industries will be profound, we must keep in mind that it will have wider economic and social impact, too, as with previous revolutions driven by steam and coal, electricity and computers.

The computer is a mechanism for acceleration: it accelerates economic activity, and this is eating up the world. It's eating up resources, it's processing, it's manufacturing, it's distributing, it's consuming. That's what the computer's real work does, and it does that 24/7, 365 days a year, non-stop, just to satisfy our own narrow needs.

I think there is some kind of disillusionment in the West about the gains of modernity and of economic growth and it takes a form of skepticism about the gains of prosperity generally.