Hannah Arendt Quotes

The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.

In the US in the 1900's 60 % of people were employed on the farms. Today it's less than 1%. If you told people back then that this would happen they wouldn't have believed it. If you told them we would have therapy, massages and spas that played important parts in our lives they would've have believed us.

I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.

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

Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.

Good intentions can often lead to unintended consequences. It is hard to imagine a law intended for the workforce known to Henry Ford can serve the needs of a workplace shaped by the innovations of Bill Gates.

A new era of production has begun. It's principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the self-regulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited capacity which requires progressively less human labor. Cybernation is already reorganizing the economic and social system to meet its own needs .... As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated [to their work] governmental measures—unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments.

Luddism is no longer with us, but today we seem to be overtaken by its opposite, the inevitability of technological change coupled with the blind belief in capitalism's ability to provide us with all we need.

… post-industrial society

The machines, which mark the triumph of science, become, by reason of the antithetic conditions of the social plexus, instruments which impoverish millions and millions of artisans and free peasants.

If agrarian society must fall to the machine, at the very least, Iranians should own the machine.

The Machine is the new Messiah. Machinery is accomplishing in the world what man has failed to do by preaching, propaganda, or the written word.

Think back to the time when Agriculture was not labor efficient. We have lost all these jobs. But I don't think anyone is too sad about it.

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

As our farms and factories grew more efficient, they accounted for a shrinking share of our economy. And the more productive agriculture and manufacturing became, the fewer people they employed.

We adapt to technological progress by raising our minimum standards of living and working to stay above this rising threshold.

Science has gone a long way toward helping man to free himself from the burden of hard labor; yet, science itself is not a liberator. It creates means, not goals. It is up to men to utilize those means to achieve reasonable goals.

Rural America's not coming back. That idea was lost with the Industrial Revolution.

These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.

Nothing increases the number of jobs so rapidly as labor-saving machinery, because it releases wants theretofore unknown, by permitting leisure.

But if capitalism had built up science as a productive force, the very character of the new mode of production was serving to make capitalism itself unnecessary.

There is not a tool, an implement, or a machine that has not resulted in a decrease in the contribution of human labor. Labor is not made permanently idle [though]; when replaced in one special category... it turns its attack against other obstacles on the main road to progress.

There are many machines throughout history that were built to do something better than a human can.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers.