Great Throughts Treasury

"Part of life’s meaning comes in not being afraid to experience it on its own terms. We are constantly trying to remake and manipulate life so that it conforms to our image of what we would like it to be. In the process, we lose life’s essence. If we were to accept life on its own terms and allow other creatures to experience the fullness of their beings, we could add to the enrichment of all life."

"Go into your life and see how deep the place is from which your life flows."

"Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek for the answers that cannot be given for you would not be able to live them and the point is to live everything . Live the questions now and perhaps without knowing it you will live along some day into the answers."

"The more communities one has access to, the more options one has for living a full and meaningful life. It is inclusivity that brings security - belonging, not belongings."

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that needs our love."

"What's different here is that we have now technologies that allow these life science companies to bypass classical breeding. That's what makes it both powerful and exciting. "

"Today we are raised with the notion that to be secure is to be financially autonomous. Amassing wealth is viewed as the primary rite of passage to a secure, autonomous existence."

"It is not uncommon in the modern world for people to retreat into the world of books to escape from the realities of the outside world. The printed word evokes the modern notion of security, with the emphasis on detachment, privacy, autonomy, predictability, and enclosed artificiality."

"We are already producing enough food to feed the world. We already have technology in place that allows us to produce more than we can find a market for. "

"Today we are raised with the notion that to be secure is to be financially autonomous. Amassing wealth is viewed as the primary rite of passage to a secure, autonomous existence"

"We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it's going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet. "

"You can't get a guarantee that genes are going to turn on and off the way you want them to. You're dealing with life. It's too unpredictable."

"We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population."

"I wanted to make sure that this be the first scientific and technology revolution in history in which the public thoroughly discussed all the potential benefits and all the potential harms, in advance of the technology coming online and running its course."

"The modern age has been characterized by a Promethean spirit, a restless energy that preys on speed records and shortcuts, unmindful of the past, uncaring of the future, existing only for the moment and the quick fix. The earthly rhythms that characterize a more pastoral way of life have been shunted aside to make room for the fast track of an urbanized existence. Lost in a sea of perpetual technological transition, modern man and woman find themselves increasingly alienated from the ecological choreography of the planet."

"What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether."

"These new genetically engineered food crops are the first wave of a generation of 'Brave New World' foods that are going to have serious health and environmental repercussions,"

"We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology."

"3-D entrepreneurs are particularly bullish about additive manufacturing, because the process requires as little as 10 percent of the raw material expended in traditional manufacturing and uses less energy than conventional factory production, thus greatly reducing the cost. In the same way that the Internet radically reduced entry costs in generating and disseminating information, giving rise to new businesses like Google and Facebook, additive manufacturing has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of producing hard goods, making entry costs sufficiently lower to encourage hundreds of thousands of mini manufacturers -- small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) -- to challenge and potentially outcompete the giant manufacturing companies that were at the center of the First and Second Industrial Revolution economies."

"A refuge is supposed to prevent what? The genes from flowing out of sight? This refuge idea won't stop insects from moving across boundaries. That's absurd."

"Across the country U.S. corporations are creating a new two-tier system of employment, composed of a 'core' staff of permanent full-time employees augmented by a peripheral pool of part-time or contingent workers."

"Americans, perhaps more than any other people in the world, define themselves in relationship to their work. From early childhood, youngsters are constantly asked what they would like to be when they grow up."

"As productivity soared in the 1920s and a growing number of workers were handed pink slips, sales dropped off dramatically....The business community hoped that by convincing those still working to buy more and save less, they could empty their warehouses and shelves and keep the American economy going. Their crusade to turn American workers into 'mass' consumers became known as the gospel of consumption."

"At the same time that the need for human labor is disappearing, the role of government is undergoing a similar diminution. Today, global companies have begun to eclipse and subsume the power of nations. Transnational enterprises have increasingly usurped the traditional role of the state, and now exercise unparalleled control over global resources, labor pools, and markets."

"Already, a spate of new start-up companies are entering the 3-D printing market with names like Within Technologies, Digital Forming, Shape Ways, Rapid Quality Manufacturing, Stratasys, Bespoke Innovations, 3D Systems, MakerBot Industries, Freedom of Creation, LGM, and Contour Crafting and are determined to reinvent the very idea of manufacturing in the Third Industrial era. The energy saved at every step of the digital manufacturing process, from reduction in materials used, to less energy expended in making the product, if applied across the global economy, adds up to a qualitative increase in energy efficiency beyond anything imaginable in the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. When the energy used to power the production process is renewable and also generated on site, the full impact of a lateral Third Industrial Revolution becomes strikingly apparent. Since approximately 84 percent of the productivity gains in the manufacturing and service industries are attributable to increases in thermodynamic efficiencies -- only 14 percent of productivity gains are the result of capital invested per worker -- we begin to grasp the significance of the enormous surge in productivity that will accompany the Third Industrial Revolution and what it will mean for society."

"Back in 1983, the United States government approved the release of the first genetically modified organism. In this case, it was a bacteria that prevents frost on food crops."

"Automation threatens to render possible the reversal of the relation between free time and working time: the possibility of working time becoming marginal and free time becoming full time. The result would be a radical trans-valuation of values, and a mode of existence incompatible with traditional culture. Advanced industrial society is in permanent mobilization against this possibility"

"Back in the mid-1980s, congressional hearings were held after we brought this litigation, and held up the first experiment. At that time, I went in front of Congress, along with the major agencies involved with this."

"As the new 3-D technology becomes more widespread, on site, just in time customized manufacturing of products will also reduce logistics costs with the possibility of huge energy savings. The cost of transporting products will plummet in the coming decades because an increasing array of goods will be produced locally in thousands of micro-manufacturing plants and transported regionally by trucks powered by green electricity and hydrogen generated on site."

"By directly eliminating human labor from the production process and by creating a reserve army of unemployed workers whose wages could be bid down lower and lower, the capitalists were inadvertently digging their own grave, as there would be fewer and fewer consumers with sufficient purchasing power to buy their products."

"Can civilization survive when only the commercial sphere is left as the primary mediator of human life? So much of the world we know has been bound up in the process of selling and buying things in the marketplace that we can't imagine any other way of structuring human affairs. The marketplace is a pervasive force in our lives: if markets are healthy, we feel buoyed; if they weaken, we despair. We are taught that acquiring and accumulating property are integral parts of our earthly sojourn and that who we are is, at least to some degree, a reflection of what we own. Now the foundation of modern life is beginning to disintegrate. The market institution which drove humanity to ideological battles, revolutions and wars is slowly dying out in the wake of a new constellation of economic realities that is moving society to rethink the kinds of bond and boundary that will define human relations in the coming century. In the new era, markets are making way for networks, and ownership is steadily being replaced by access. Companies and consumers are beginning to abandon the central reality of modern economic life?the market exchange of property between buyers and sellers. Instead, suppliers hold on to property in the new economy and lease, rent or charge an admission fee, subscription of membership dues for its use. The exchange of property between buyers and sellers?the most important feature of the modern market system?gives way to access between servers and clients operating in a network relationship. Many companies no longer sell things to one another but rather pool and share their collective resources creating vast supplier-user networks."

"Despite the American workers' just claim to a piece of the productivity pie, the business community has steadfastly held the line against any attempts to shorten the workweek and increase wages to accommodate the rapid gains in productivity."

"Communication/energy regimes largely determine the way societies are organized, and, particularly, how the fruits of commerce and trade are distributed, how political power is exercised, and how social relations are conducted. The First and Second Industrial Revolutions were built atop the most centralized energy regimes every conceived. Fossil fuels -- coal, oil, and natural gas -- are elite energies because they are found only in select places. They require a significant military investment to secure them and continual geopolitical management to assure their availability. They also require centralized, command and control systems, and massive concentrations of capital to move them from underground to end users. The ability to concentrate capital -- the essence of modern capitalism -- is critical to the effective performance of the system as a whole. The centralized energy infrastructure, in turn, sets the conditions for the rest of the economy, encouraging similar business models across every sector."

"Europe will not accept genetically modified foods. It doesn?t make any difference in the final analysis what Brussels does, what Washington does, or what the World Trade Organization does."

"Cultural resources risk over exploitation and depletion at the hands of commerce just as natural resources did during the Industrial age. Finding a sustainable way to preserve and enhance the rich cultural diversity that is the lifeblood of civilization in a global network economy increasingly based on paid access to commodified cultural experiences is one of the primary political tasks of the new century."

"For more than forty years, the service sector has been absorbing the job losses in the manufacturing industries."

"Europe's strength is that each culture is a gift to share."

"Ever since the depression years of the 1930s, price and commodity supports have been used to both artificially prop up the price of farm commodities and pay farmers not to produce in order to curtail production. Again, Say's law, that supply creates is own demand, has proven wrong."

"How do you deal with a whole ecosystem where wild grasses and weeds have become herbicide-resistant, pest-resistant, and viral-resistant?"

"I know quite a few farmers all over the United States who have tried this and have said the opposite, that they have to use more herbicides, not less. The same holds true with BT."

"For a growing number of wealthier Americans, living inside walled communities is a way of 'internalizing their economic position and privilege and excluding others from sharing it."

"In the new network economy, both physical and intellectual property are more likely to be accessed by businesses rather than exchanged. Ownership of physical capital, once the heart of the industrial way of life, becomes increasingly marginal to the economic process. Intellectual capital, on the other hand, is the driving force of the new era and much coveted. Not surprisingly, the new means of organizing economic life brings with it different ways of concentrating economic power in fewer corporate hands. In the era of networks, suppliers who amass valuable intellectual capital are beginning to exercise control over the conditions and terms by which users secure access to critical ideas, knowledge and expertise."

"If your corn has a herbicide-tolerant gene, it means you can spray your herbicides and kill the weeds; you won't kill your corn because it's producing a gene that makes it tolerant of the herbicide."

"In truth it is far too early to know where the new consciousness will lead. On the one hand, the commercial forces are both powerful and seductive and already are bringing large numbers of people into the new worlds of cultural production. On the other hand, many young people are using their new-found senses of relatedness and connectivity to challenge an unbridled commercial ethic and create new communities of shared interests. Whether the forces of cultural commerce will ultimately prevail or a renewed cultural realm is able to strike a balance between the two spheres is open to question."

"In this country, the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here, we didn't have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture."

"It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there's no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic."

"It is possible to be in favor of progress, freedom of inquiry and the advancement of consciousness and still be opposed to essential elements of the prevailing scientific and technological world view. We stifle freedom of inquiry and undermine the great potential of human consciousness only when we steadfastly refuse to entertain new ways of re-imagining our world"

"Increasingly, American workers are being forced to settle for dead-end jobs just to survive."

"It seemed to me that we needed to have a thorough and thoughtful global discussion on the potential environmental implications of reseeding the earth with genetically modified organisms."

"It's happened before, in 1848 and in 1968. The youth of the world took to the streets to protest the injustices of autocratic political regimes and rapacious business interests and to demand the most basic human right to participate as equal citizens in the affairs of society."