Naomi Klein Quotes

Unsurprisingly, the most vocal opponents of new technologies are those who dominated the old.

Many people mistakenly think a new technology cancels out an old one.

With any advent in technology, any technological innovation, there is the good and the bad.

The American Colossus was fiercely intent on appropriating and exploiting the riches of all continents - grasping with both hands, reaping where he had not sown, wasting what he thought would last forever. New railroads were opening new territory. The exploiters were pushing farther and farther into the wilderness. The man who could get his hands on the biggest slice of natural resources was the best citizen. Wealth and virtue were supposed to trot in double harness.

The white men in the East are like birds. They are hatching out their eggs every year, and there is not room enough in the East, and they must go elsewhere; and they come out West, as you have seen them coming for the last few years.

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.

Within my own life, I read all the beloved novels by lamps of vegetable oil; I saw the Standard Oil invading my own village, I saw gas lamps in the Chinese shops in Shanghai; and I saw their elimination by electric lights.

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it's like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization.

The British who arrived in the United States in the eighteen-thirties and forties had imagined the young republic as a wide-eyed adolescent, socially ungainly and politically gauche, but with some hint of promise.

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

We now discovered the Shores crowded with thousands of People––Men Women & Children––May I may venture to say Tens of Thousands; From the Fort to the Place of Landing altho’ near half a Mile, you could see little else along the Shores-- -in the Streets and on Board every Vessel, but Heads standing as thick as Ears of corn before the Harvest-

We maintain that it is a right of humanity … that this vast territory be inhabited by an industrious people.

It is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand … and cover the whole northern if not the southern continent.

The emancipation of Texas will extend the principles of self-government, over a rich and neighbouring country, and open a vast field there for enterprise, wealth, and happiness, and for those who wish to escape from the frozen blasts of a northern climate, by removing to a more congenial one. It will promote and accelerate the march of the present age, for it will open a door through which a bright and constant stream of light and intelligence will flow from this great northern fountain over the benighted regions of Mexico

… these bold and indigent strangers, saying as their excuse when challenged for titles, that we had solicited for colonists and they had come accordingly … [that it] was against the laws of God and nature that so much land should be idle while so many Christians wanted it to work on and to raise their bread..

America has been peopled by Europeans primarily because they expected in that country to make more money more easily.

The frontier is not merely a dramatic imagery but a very real process, indeed the basic socio-technical process that informs the experience of certain people and countries. As a process, it is dynamic and essentially progressive, although fraught with problems of its own, as is every other dimension of human life.

When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the Land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.

America was not discovered. America was built.

Every great invention takes a livelihood away from 50,000 men--& within ten years creates a livelihood for half a million.

Abroad, technological change will create even more disruption as the wave of acceleration engulfs societies that have not yet come to terms with the social demands of industrialization, let alone more recent technological change. Mass disorientation can become the source of both national aggression and non-state terrorism—aggression and terrorism made all the more devastating by access to weapons that are not only increasingly powerful but also deployable by ever smaller groups.

Every time there is a major shift in technology, it's been hugely exciting and scary at the same time. I have seen some really drastic changes in technology, like shooting only film to video to digital.

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.

Every exploration is an appropriation.