Winifred Holtby Quotes

We can go into no mechanic shop, into no manufactory of any description, upon no farm or plantation, or travel a mile on our railroads or in our steamboats, without seeing evidence of our originality and witnessing the fruits of our ingenuity and enterprise.

Sociology almost always dominates technology. Ideas often lie unused because people do not want to use them.

Everything new endangers something old. A new machine replaces human hands; a new source of power threatens old businesses; a new trade route wipes out the supremacy of old ports and brings prosperity to new ones. This is the price that must be paid for progress and it is worth it.

Progress is never accepted by everybody.

We plow new fields, we open new mines, we found new cities, we girdle the land with iron roads and lace the air with telegraph wires. We add knowledge to knowledge and utilize invention after invention. Yet it becomes no easier for the masses of our people to make a living. On the contrary, it is becoming harder.

Mastership hath many shifts whereby it striveth to keep itself alive in the world. And now hear a marvel: whereas thou sayest these two times that out of one man ye may get but one man's work, in days to come one man shall do the work of a hundred men - yea, of a thousand or more: and this is the shift of mastership that shall make many masters and many rich men.

The people who resist change will be confronted by the growing number of people who see that better ways are available; thanks to technology.

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.

We ought not to be over-anxious to encourage innovation in cases of doubtful improvement, for an old system must ever have two advantages over a new one; it is established, and it is understood.

Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.

We do things much the same way as we did 50, 60 or even 70 years ago. The answers may not be wrong, but we haven't experimented to see whether they are or not.

The new environment dictates two rules: first, everything happens faster; second, anything that can be done will be done, if not by you, then by someone else, somewhere.

A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.

If you don't let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood.

Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.

I'm in favor of progress; it's change I don't like.

Where men had once howled and hacked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well, the machines hummed and whirred and clicked, and made parts for baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles-the fruits of peace.

Change, not habit, is what gets most of us down; habit is the stabilizer of human society, change accounts for its progress.

It is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.

When I look out in the future, I can't imagine a world, 500 years from now, where we don't have robots everywhere.

It's possible to go faster than folk are ready for; that's the key to democracy.

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run-and often in the short one-the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress.

Does a man shrink from change? Why, what can come into being save by change?

There is a strong conservative instinct in the average man or woman, born of the hereditary fear of life, that prompts them to cling to old standards, or, if too intelligent to look inhospitably upon progress, to move very slowly. Both types are the brakes and wheelhorses necessary to a stable civilization, but history, even current history in the newspapers, would be dull reading if there were no adventurous spirits willing to do battle for new ideas.