Henry David Thoreau Quotes

As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for 'better' jobs in the city. We emptied America's rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories.

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

The embourgeoisement of China's proletariat may be the inevitable result of its industrialization, but 'inevitable' isn't the same as 'speedy.'

It's the Industrial Revolution and the growth of urban concentrations that led to a sense of anonymity.

As society has shifted from an agrarian to an urban structure, the joy and necessity of diligent, hard work have been neglected.

The Industrial Revolution has two phases: one material, the other social; one concerning the making of things, the other concerning the making of men.

The industrial revolution fueled all of humanity, everything we do has been exploding ever since. It's been the biggest most impacting thing, not only for human beings in the last 250 million years, but also the planet, which caused the ice age, which buried the forest. It's this circle because of the industrial revolution, it's neither good or bad, it enabled all of modernization, extended our life, it changed everything. It's the most impactful thing that happened to the planet and the people.

When I moved to Beijing in 2005 to write, I was accustomed to hearing the story of China's transformation told in vast, sweeping strokes - involving one fifth of humanity and great pivots of politics and economics.

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.

Now this problem of the adjustment of man to his natural resources, and the problem of how such things as industrialization and urbanization can be accepted without destroying the traditional values of civilization and corrupting the inner vitality of its life—these things are not only problems of America; they are the problems of men everywhere.

Industrial forces set in motion by steam and electricity have materially changed the structure of our civilization.

Those above are going down, those below are going up.

Industrialization divorces the family from society. The place of business moves away from the place of residence: the father goes to work in the plant or in the office, miles away from the home. Wife and children are no longer integrated into the productive work. They may, indeed, have their own jobs and go to work themselves; but even if they should work in the same plant or the same office as the man of the family, they do not work as a family unit.

20 centuries of progress have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account and a high opinion of himself but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

Industrialization, by drawing people from the countryside to the cities brings with it the weakening of traditional political and social support systems.

Urban growth, ethnic and religious diversity. and the spread of large corporations destroyed the reality of Protestant, middle-class power in the region and the ability of their ideology and the pioneer symbol to remain uncontested. The region's leadership class came to include Catholics as well as Protestants, corporate leaders, professionals, and small producers.

The industrial revolution turned time into a commodity.

In Victorian England, laborers were pushed off the farms, replaced by steam power.

The old order of the country gave way to the new order of the city. Rural morality was replaced by urban morality, rural voices by urban voices, rural votes by urban votes.

Technology is often not a prime mover but a second-order consequence of food surpluses, urbanization, secularism, political stability ... and other conditions that create a fertile climate for innovation.

The democratic political institutions of Western countries arose and matured as industrial capitalism matured. It was a time of historically unprecedented economic growth and the concomitant development of new social groupings and relationships. They arose in elite political cultures that were in the main ethnically homogeneous, even if, notably in the American case, the society at large was considerably less so.

So far, the United States knows nothing of the difficulties of over-population; and historic realities of a nature to hamper the free play of economic forces exist only in a very limited degree. Quite the reverse is true in Europe.

Farmers who left the countryside for China’s cities and factory towns starting in the late 1980s now have children who dream of earning college degrees and landing white collar jobs.

My favorite zone is from 1890 -1915, that zone that spans the overlap of the so-called Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. People had such a boundless sense of optimism; They felt they could do anything they wanted to do, and they went out and tried to do it.