Harry Kroto Quotes

In twenty-first-century America, our stories have become one and the same: we work to consume, we live to consume, we are what we consume.

What we want is a social harmony, even as we live in a world where any idea about 'the real thing' is as likely to evoke the ancient memory of an advertisement for a soda pop as anything solid or necessary.

In the old days the studios guided your career. Now it's all up to you.

The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.

There are more clocks than ever - clocks on computers, on cell phones, on televisions, on any screen available, telling time to the digital second - but they all seem to matter less.

And the Republican Party especially associates the market with the idea of progress, goodness, family, and points us toward the mall as an answer to all our personal dreams.

The slogan of progress is changing from the full dinner pail to the full garage.

I see groups that are hot one minute, and next time you see them, they're asking if you want a soda with that Happy Meal.

How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?

We've become such a restaurant society.

Name anything - high-definition TV, computer obsolescence - and I'm pretty much annoyed by it.

The engine of ancient society was religion but the engine of contemporary society, as I see it, is advertising.

I feel like I'm always having to justify why I haven't kept in touch with anyone from the old days in Stoke-on-Trent, but I'm like that with anybody. I don't let anybody in. I just rely on myself.

If you take a frozen box and stick it in the microwave, you become connected to the factory. We've forgotten who we are.

Inevitably, we will spend a multiple of the amount we used to drop on a new router once the old one petered out. The New Wifi is the $5 latte to the standard cup of coffee.

That's the kind of consumer society we live in. We're always looking for the next product that's going to change your life instead of just going out and changing your life.

I've never had the experience of 10 years at Unilever and five years at Coca Cola. But I'm not the marketing director who only wants 25 per cent a year on the revenues. In the old days, you sold something, and you would be happy. At Ajax, we thought we needed more from that than selling a seat and making five grand.

In the old days wrestling had a certain showmanship. All those people paid their dues. They knew how to wrestle.

Social media has given us the world at our fingertips every morning. And we watch it change, live. In the morning, in the old days, we'd read the 'Post,' and that was what we had.

In the old days I never thought about money - but then, of course, the clothes were so ugly in the '80s there was nothing I wanted.

For a while, I have had this theory that we, as a society, are coming to the end of the mass production, industrial phase of the human race.

Society is fast - fast food, fast cars, fast everything.

Commercialism in the Western world has got us by the scruff of the neck. It's a technological takeover, and we can't even see it happening because we're too busy enjoying it.

Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household.

America was in full swing now, all the papers said so, and people were rushing forward, leaving behind the horrors of war. She understood the reasons, but they were rushing, like Lon, toward long hours and profits, neglecting the things that brought beauty to the world.