J. William Fulbright Quotes

There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America.

I've always had a strong love and a sense of care for kids. And the one thing is evident and is so true - the kids are our future.

Technology is the future, I have seen the third industrial revolution, and we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution.

A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind.

[In eighteenth-century Britain] engineers for the most began as simple workmen, skilful and ambitious but usually illiterate and self-taught. They were either millwrights like Bramah, mechanics like Murdoch and George Stephenson, or smiths like Newcomen and Maudslay.

A great industrial nation may conquer the world in the span of a single life, but its Achilles' heel is time. Its children, what of them?

Even the development of the steam engine owed but little to the advancement of science.

There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America. It was not until I had seen the water-works at Chicago that I realised the wonders of machinery; the rise and fall of the steel rods, the symmetrical motion of the great wheels is the most beautiful rhythmic thing I have ever seen.

The National is the most advanced package of technological wonders yet assembled under one roof.

The vanishing point leads to the missiles of today, which can take us out of this world. It could be that the west's greatest mistakes were the 'invention' of the external vanishing point and the internal combustion engine.

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.

When I look at the world it fills me with sorrow, little children today are really going to suffer tomorrow.

When we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface.... So each of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children's, and of what our children's future will hold.

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.

Think for a moment of the great agents and engines of our civilization, and then think what shadowy ideas they all once were. The wheels of the steamship turned as swiftly as they do now, but as silent and unsubstantial as the motions of the inventor's thought; and in the noiseless loom of his meditation were woven the sinews of the printing-press, whose thunder shakes the world.

Within the child lies the fate of the future.

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.

All recognized famous inventors had capable predecessors and successors and made their improvements at a time when society was capable of using their product.

James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of the age, and humanity made its first tentative steps into an industrial way of life that would, over the next two centuries, forever change the world.

Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.

There is nothing more precious to a parent than a child, and nothing more important to our future than the safety of all our children.

We must therefore turn to the child as to the key to the fate of our future life.

Many people have tried to define science fiction. I like to call it the literature of exploration and change. While other genres obsess upon so-called eternal verities, SF deals with the possibility that our children may have different problems. They may, indeed, be different than we have been.

Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing - electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important - I'm not taking anything away from that - but innovation is the real driver of progress.