John Ruggles Quotes

The great question, however, for the poor man is, or shortly will be, that of escape from competition with labor-saving machinery

In America, innovation does not just improve our lives. It is the way we make our living.

As well might it be said that, because we are ignorant of the laws by which metals are produced and trees developed, we cannot know anything of the origin of steamships and railways.

History has repeatedly shown that when a new method or material becomes available, new uses for it arise.

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.

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.

Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator.

I like to think about machines and technology in relation to landscape and architecture.

Freedom has invented every useful machine, from the lowest to the highest, from the simplest to the most complex.

I use my mind to solve problems and invent things.

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.

To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions.

The more a person learns how to use the forces of nature for his own purposes, by means of perfecting the sciences and the invention and improvement of machines, the more he will produce.

Looking at what has already been accomplished, some find it difficult to conceive that this flood of discoveries and improvements is still to maintain its progress, and even exhibit a swelling tide .... These apprehensions, it is plain, are not to be fulfilled in our day. At no time have there been more decisive indications that every step that is taken in this field ... does but open new scenes to explore and prepares the way for new triumphs.

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

One of the objections most frequently urged against machinery is, that it has a tendency to supersede much of the handlabour which was previously employed; and in fact unless a machine diminished the labour necessary to make an article, it could never come into use.

Driven by globalization and technology our country and our economy is becoming different every day.

Invention breeds invention.

A completely industrialized society is of no consequence to me.

The history of economic growth is the history of people making more with less and shifting into new jobs that were unheard of in the previous generation.

In our State the locomotive has waked up the sleeping energies of a great people, and is transforming wasted fields into blooming gardens, and arousing men and women from the dull and heavy sleep that dwells with satisfaction upon the past, into the bright intelligence that looks to a glorious future ….

Humanity is not yet sufficiently advanced to be willingly led by the discoverer's keen searching sense. But who knows? Perhaps it is better in this present world of ours that a revolutionary idea or invention instead of being helped and patted, be hampered and ill-treated in its adolescence — by want of means, by selfish interest, pedantry, stupidity and ignorance; that it be attacked and stifled; that it pass through bitter trials and tribulations, through the heartless strife of commercial existence. So do we get our light. So all that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.

For one person who is blessed with the power of invention, many will always be found who have the capacity of applying principles.

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.

Ideas are what power our economy.