Walter Russell Mead Quotes

The history of the Erie Railroad ever since 1901 has been a record of progress.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

A good example of the modern world is the Eurotunnel. And mobile phones - I like them.

Technology has always been a catalyst for change, such as the invention of the airplane or the Internet.

During the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, TV, air travel, and satellites, has woven a network of communication which puts each part of the world in to almost instant contact with all the other parts.

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

The United States as we know it today is largely the result of mechanical inventions, and in particular of agricultural machinery and the railroad.

You look at the steamboat, the railroad, the car, the airplane - not all of these were invented in the Anglo-American world, but they were popularized and extended by it. They were made possible by the financial architecture, the capital intensive operations invented and developed by the Anglo-Americans.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space.

Through machinery, man can exert tremendous powers almost as fantastic as if he were the hero of a fairy tale. Through machinery, man can travel with an ever increasing velocity; he can fly through the air and go beneath the surface of the ocean.

Mankind had the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and now this third one, the information revolution.

When you brought the Industrial Revolution in, all of a sudden India and China went from being the dominant global powers to being powers dominated by those who understood how to apply this new technology.

The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet. So you don't have to wait for a letter to get to England in six weeks, you have almost instant communication. That was an enormous shift.

A completely industrialized society is of no consequence to me.

Soon you’ll be whirled along by steam in a country now only inhabited by wild beasts and Indians

Congress commissioned the first telegraph line, the railroads, the Internet. The role of the government in developing new technology is often misunderstood.

...industrialisation took centuries, rather than decades

It was only through the Government's help that anything this gargantuan in size could be accomplished, much as landing on the Moon. It was not rugged individualists who built the railroad, it was rugged corporations who formed and financed themselves as entities. It was the rugged federal government that came up with the federal loans, and the land grants, that enabled it to be built. Amid all the romance of building the railroad we tend to forget that it was one of the major industrial enterprises of its age.

Technology has miniaturized the globe, reducing vast oceans to mere ponds. Distant countries are now almost neighbors as our bodies travel faster than the speed of sound and our voices at the speed of light. ... Today the world is not much bigger than a ball spinning on the finger of science.

It is impossible for any power to become eminent in commerce, without excelling in manufactures and navigation. America is capable of supporting and increasing both …

The greatness of the Erie Canal is the American equal only of its equality and liberty.

The bigness and the economic “power” of the railroad companies did not impede the emergence of the motor car and the airplane.

We do not ride upon the railroad. It rides upon us.

The progress that we see going on in transportation is practically abolishing the distances which separate various sections of mankind. As a result of the exploitation of its natural and economic resources, each particular portion of the earth's surface is undergoing ceaseless alteration; the development of transportation is constantly creating new conditions.