David S. Landes > Quotes

“In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always right, but because they are positive. Even when wrong, they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement, and success. Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.
The one lesson that emerges is the need to keep trying. No miracles. No perfection. No millennium. No apocalypse. We must cultivate a skeptical faith, avoid dogma, listen and watch well, try to clarify and define ends, the better to choose means.”
― David S. Landes

“Where there are kings, there must be the greatest cowards. For men’s souls are enslaved and refuse to run risks readily and recklessly to increase the power of somebody else. But independent people, taking risks on their own behalf and not on behalf of others, are willing and eager to go into danger, for they themselves enjoy the prize of victory.”
― David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

“the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronising the actions of men”
― David Landes

“As for me, I prefer truth to goodthink. I feel surer on my ground.”
― David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

“Indications, of course, are not enough. Knowledge of the time must be combined with obedience -- what social scientists like to call time discipline. The indications are in effect commands, for responsiveness to these cues is imprinted on us and we ignore them at our peril.”
― david s. landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World

“The invention of the mechanical clock was one of a number of major advances that turned Europe from a weak, peripheral, highly vulnerable outpost of Mediterranean civilization into a hegemonic aggressor.”
― David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World

“... the invention of the mechanical clock in medieval Europe. This was one of the great inventions in this history of mankind -- not in a class with fire and the wheel, but comparable to movable type in its revolutionary implications for cultural values, technological change, social and political organization, and personality.”
― David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World

“... if one is to rely on human judges, it is very important that they never admit to error.”
― David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World

“Most people operate within a margin of plus or minus several minutes.”
― David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World

“The mechanical clock was self-contained, and once horologists learned to drive it by means of a coiled spring rather than a falling weight, it could be miniaturized so as to be portable, whether in the household or on the person. It was this possibility of widespread private use that laid the basis for 'time discipline,' as against 'time obedience.' One can ... use public clocks to simon people for one purpose or another; but that is not punctuality. Punctuality comes from within, not from without. It is the mechanical clock that made possible, for better or worse, a civilization attentive to the passage of time, hence to productivity and performance.”
― David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World

“Thus Persia after Issus (333 B.C.E.) and Gaugamela (331 B.C.E.); Rome after the sack by Alaric (410); and the Sassanian empire after Qadisiya (637) and Nehawand (642). Also Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru.”
― David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

“But in 1497, pressure from the Roman Church and Spain led the Portuguese crown to abandon this tolerance. Some seventy thousand Jews were forced into a bogus but nevertheless sacramentally valid baptism. In 1506, Lisbon saw its first pogrom, which left two thousand “converted” Jews dead. (Spain had been doing as much for two hundred years.) From then on, the intellectual and scientific life of Portugal descended into an abyss of bigotry, fanaticism, and purity of blood.* The descent was gradual. The Portuguese Inquisition was installed only in the 1540s and burned its first heretic in 1543; but it did not become grimly unrelenting until the 1580s, after the union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns in the person of Philip II. In the meantime, the crypto-Jews, including Abraham Zacut and other astronomers, found life in Portugal dangerous enough to leave in droves. They took with them money, commercial know-how, connections, knowledge, and—even more serious—those immeasurable qualities of curiosity and dissent that are the leaven of thought. That was a loss, but in matters of intolerance, the persecutor’s greatest loss is self-inflicted. It is this process of self-diminution that gives persecution its durability, that makes it, not the event of the moment, or of the reign, but of lifetimes and centuries. By 1513, Portugal wanted for astronomers; by the 1520s, scientific leadership had gone. The country tried to create a new Christian astronomical and mathematical tradition but failed, not least because good astronomers found themselves suspected of Judaism.12 (Compare the suspicious response to doctors in Inquisition Spain.)”
― David S. Landes, Wealth And Poverty Of Nations

“Na Turquia otomana, o serviço de combate a incêndios estava entregue a companhias privadas que acudiam a correr quando soava o alarme. Competiam entre si e negociavam o preço com os donos da casa no próprio local. Enquanto as negociações prosseguiam, o incêndio atingia novas proporções e o que estava em jogo consumia-se. Ou propagava-se. Entre mesquinhez e ganância, muito incêndio em residência se converteu numa conflagração em massa.”
― David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

“You should make an effort to make something that will benefit society.”
― David S. Landes, Dynasties: Fortunes and Misfortunes of the World's Great Family Businesses

“The stress on observation and the reality principle—you can believe what you see, so long as you see what I see—paid off beyond understanding.”
― David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor