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“Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice - read books.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Becoming a modern society is about industrialization, urbanization, and rising levels of literacy, education, and wealth. The qualities that make a society Western, in contrast, are special: the classical legacy, Christianity, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, civil society.”
― Samuel P. Huntington

“Small wonder our national spirit is husk empty. We have more information but less knowledge. More communication but less community. More goods but less goodwill. More of virtually everything save that which the human spirit requires. So distracted have we become sating this new need or that material appetite, we hardly noticed the departure of happiness”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“So it was not superior thinkers, inventors or businesses that made Europe rich, but the fact that European elites were less successful in obstructing them... This is somewhat similar to our era of globalization. More countries, in more places, now have access to the sum of humanity's knowledge, and are open to the best innovations from other places... If progress is blocked in one place, many others will continue humanity's journey. (217-218)”
― Johan Norberg, Progress - Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

“Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, build on to that which is already excellent.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“Nations rise and fall, flourish and decay, by what they believe in and by what their culture stands for.”
― Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

“Modernization, socialization, and progression doesn’t alter nor permit discarding the morals and the laws one should abide themselves too.”
― Avra Amar Filion, The Ellison Effect

“This division is not one by religious affiliation, rather it separates the extremists and the peace-loving people.
Therefor I'm optimistic: now a humanistic Islam is getting shaken awake. Moderate Islam needs now to finally break cover and explain how to deal with the violence-glorifying parts of the Quran. The (psychological) repression that this has nothing to do with our belief doesn't work anymore. We have to face this challenge.”
― Mouhanad Khorchide

“Most lost jobs are outsourced to the past.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

“It's in the nature of the landscape to change, and it's in the nature of people to help the process along...”
― John Darnielle, Universal Harvester

“We are bored in the city, to still discover mysteries on the signs along the street, latest state of humor and poetry, requires getting damned tired...

Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)”
― Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader

“The modern human lives in a cesspool of man-made electromagnetic radiation.”
― Steven Magee

“Without the low operating costs, high efficiency, high reliability, and great durability of diesel engines, it would have been impossible to reach the extent of globalization that now defines the modern economy.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“To be morally educated is to realize that such would be a terrible price. Mechanical advance is the slack taken up of
Our failing humanity. Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.”
― Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

“It is announced that the United States of Africa have built a reservation for ethnologists in the heart of Africa, where they are protected and maintained in ideal ecological survival conditions and fed at set times of day as is the custom in their countries of origin. The reservation is off-limits to Africans, whether their intentions be philanthropic, scientific or cannibalistic, for fear of damaging the natural equilibrium of the tribe or endangering its chances of breeding, though matters in this regard are already very precarious. The African states assure us that all possible measures will be taken to save this disappearing race: the crucial thing is that it should be completely isolated from the outside world. The first experiment along these lines had already been attempted years ago by the people of Chad, whom the French government had paid a great deal to carry on holding a certain Mme Claustre, an anthropologist, and whom they had thereby saved from the clutches of the Whites who wished to turn her over to scientific prostitution. This almost accidental event soon resulted in all the West’s anthropologists rushing off to African reservations, where they could at last devote themselves to the observation of the only ethnic group worthy of the name—their own. By contrast, upon their approach, all the beasts of the savannahs ran off to take refuge in urban zoos, and the Africans themselves withdrew into their missions, for fear of being devoured by ethnologists who had very rapidly reverted to cannibalism.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“The trouble with the nations of the West is that they are young, fickle, foolish and wealthy.”
― Swami Vivekananda, OUR WOMEN

“...er det meget sterke krefter som søker å erstatte friluftsliv med mekanisert miljøødeleggende og konkurranseformet opphold i natur.”
― Arne Næss, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle

“Everybody in those days was a foreigner, no matter where they were born; as industrial modernization had its way with people and places, no one was native to the transformation of the United States from an agricultural economy to the foremost industrial power in the world--the factory being both the cause and the effect of an act of becoming, the likes of which nobody had ever seen before.”
― Jerry Herron

“But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Influential scholars since the mid-twentieth century have argued that the essential character of Ottoman modernity was reactive, imitative, defensive, and ultimately defective relative to the presumably more successful modernization projects of Germany, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and America, where while exemplifying and eventually monopolizing claims to modernity, also brought two world wars, the Holocaust, the nuclear immolation of Japanese cities, and the Cold War, among other worldwide cataclysms.”
― Michael Provence, The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Frankly, I think they could have fast-tracked the whole thing. How did it take from 1590-something to 1890-something to improve on one of the best inventions ever? Three hundred years? That's way too long. What were they busy doing in that time? A few wars? Some genocide? Burning witches? None of that was worth ignoring the flush toilet.”
― A.S. King, Still Life with Tornado

“One of the most intriguing questions of our time is why in the developing countries their newly established liberal political institutions - set up with great hopes and idealism - survived in a handful of them and not in others. Even in countries where they did survive, the nature of infraction against them was brutal and the effectiveness of their resilience against it uncertain.

One of the least explored areas in this respect is whether the developing countries and their elite are capable of learning from their past experiences - despite their political passivity, gullibility and cynicism - how to develop patterns of political conduct which will be widely viewed as proper and fruitful. To put it another way, whether they would be able to learn to strike a balance
between what is normatively desirable and what is politically possible in operating public institutions and in dealing with political adversaries. What then are the problems in their learning and assimilating such normative-pragmatic dos and don'ts?

The area where such problems can be fruitfully examined is the area of political society where different kinds of normative-pragmatic mix and imbalance affect the operation, effectiveness and survival of public institutions. Attempts at overly normative commitments (of personal morality, religion or secular ideology) and an overly pragmatic approach uncommitted to political values (of selfish, corrupt and cynical use of political power) often weaken the operations of liberal political institutions. Hence the need for a normative-pragmatic balance.”
― A.H. Somjee, Political Society in Developing Countries

“An diesem Abend drehte sich das Gespräch um die unendlichen, glorreichen, immensen Perspektiven der neuen Kommunikationsformen und insbesondere des Internet. Charles war nicht damit einverstanden: Hinter dem technischen Flitterwerk, sagte er, lauere eine neue Art der Entfremdung, die nur zu noch größerem Konsumverhalten und weiterem Verlust an Realitätsbewusstsein und menschlichen Werten beitragen werde.”
― Jean-Christophe Grangé, Le Concile de pierre

“Birds and animals still benefit from real nature, whereas humans don't, because they live and breathe in modernization, not in civilization; civilization always stands by nature that humans have left and forgotten centuries ago.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Confusion over identity arises as a condition of living in the modern world. Modernization means constant change and disruption, and the opening up of choices that did not exist before. It is mobile, fluid, and complex. This fluidity is by and large a good thing: over generations, millions of people have been fleeing villages and traditional societies that do not offer them choices, in favor of ones that do.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“Subsidies, modernization, weather hardening, and disaster recovery are some of the code words the government uses to detail massive amounts of free taxpayer money it gives to private corporations.”
― Steven Magee

“The mistake the Bolsheviks made was not in aiming at the modernisation of Russia. That was entirely sensible. Nor was it a mistake to ascribe a major role in the economy to the state. This is quite normal in the modern world. Their mistake was to suppose that successful modernisation required the elimination of the market and of private enterprise. They did not realise the role that the market and private enterprise can play in generating and maintaining self-sustaining economic growth. Looking at all economic activity as if it were a zero-sum game was very one-sided. Furthermore, the Bolsheviks failed to realise that for the state to attempt to micromanage every farm, factory and office is a very inefficient form of management, that wastes information and potential local initiatives and entrepreneurship. Furthermore, coercion tends, in general, to be less effective than market incentives in raising labour productivity, and to be indifferent to human suffering and loss of life (see Chapters 6 and 7).”
― Michael Ellman, Socialist Planning

“Almost overnight, Soviet peasants needed to become factory workers and miners. Industrialization was to be financed by domestic means, given the absence of any meaningful foreign investments in the country; this meant that the peasantry that did not join the industrial workforce had to foot much of the bill. Herding them into collective farms seemed a promising way to force them to pay this bill. Stalin would state, not long after he unleashed the full brunt of his modernization program, that the Soviet Union was at least half a century behind the industrialized world, and needed to catch up with it within a decade. Every sacrifice toward this goal was justified. This, then, was the broader context in which Soviet daily life played itself out between 1928 and 1933.”
― Kees Boterbloem, Life in Stalin's Soviet Union

“Kakor je nemogoče izmeriti srečo, lahko pa izmeriš srčni utrip, tako je nemogoče jasno izmeriti strošek sosedove gnojnice v tvojem potoku, lahko pa izmeriš število ljudi, ki iz tvoje doline vsak mesec romajo na onkološki oddelek v Ljubljani.”
― Nataša Kramberger, Po vsej sili živ

“Imagine creating a product so helpful it solved all the problems of humanity and then humanity complaining because it's bored. Now you understand the problem of ChatGPT”
― Amber Garibay, The AI Writing Coach: How to Use Email, ChatGPT, and a Rubber Chicken to Become a Best-Selling Author and Sell More Books : A Guide to AI, Email, and Smart ... PLAN: Amber Garibay for President Book 2)