Kirkpatrick Sale > Quotes

“Everyone is shy --- it is the inborn modesty that makes us
able to live in harmony with other creatures and our fellows.
Achievement comes not by denying shyness but, occasionally, by
setting it aside and letting pride and perspiration come
first.”
― Kirkpatrick Sale

“It was the task of industrial society to destroy all of that. All that "community" implies -- self-sufficiency, mutual aid, morality in the marketplace, stubborn tradition, regulation by custom, organic knowledge instead of mechanistic science -- had to be steadily and systematically disrupted and displaced. All of the practices that kept the individual from being a consumer had to be done away with so that the cogs and wheels of an unfettered machine called "the economy" could operate without interference, influenced merely by invisible hands and inevitable balances and all the rest of that benevolent free-market system guided by what Cobbett called, his lip curled toward Hume and James Steuart and Adam Smith, "Scotch Feelosophy.”
― Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age

“The concerns and methods vary, but there is to it all, at bottom, a message that is unmistakably Luddistic: beware the technological juggernaut, reckon the terrible costs, understand the worlds being lost in the world being gained, reflect on the price of the machine and its systems on your life, pay attention to the natural world and its increasing destruction, resist the seductive catastrophe of industrialism.”
― Kirkpatrick Sale

“The picture is perfectly clear: the entire economy is fueled not by profit, not by production, but by debt. Debt, moreover, that no one is working on paying back and that everyone needs to believe—this is the pipe dream that sustains the whole charade—will certainly be paid by future generations.”
― Kirkpatrick Sale, The Collapse of 2020

“A comprehensive study of 15,000 scientific papers issued by a United Nations task force in May 2019, the largest and most extensive ever undertaken, found that at least 1 million species of animals and plants are at severe risk of extinction. According to its chair, Sir Robert Watson, “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever” and “we are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”
― Kirkpatrick Sale, The Collapse of 2020

“(C)ybernetics, the science of computers, comes from the Greek kubernetes, "helmsman" or "governor," meaning simply that the machine is in charge.”
― Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age

“Imagine a Sapiens group - a tribe of five hundred, say, in bands of twenty-five or so--living around 55,000 years ago in the lowlands near the headwaters of the White Nile in what is today southern Sudan. They are the inheritors of the modern culture that has spread from southern Africa, and they survive with the skillful hunting and fishing techniques developed over the millennia, the close-knit organizations that establish and maintain group harmony, the communications capabilities of at least a rudimentary language, and a healthy diet based on both plants and animals in abundance. But there are other inheritor bands around, for the region is fertile and the climate generally benign, and they continue to grow in population and this means that in time it gets harder and harder to find new fields of tubers, or large herds of impala, or the usual swamp tortoises. Human pressure on the area is pushing it past its carrying capacity, and relations with other bands in other tribes become increasingly stressful as competition intensifies.”
― Kirkpatrick Sale, After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination