Vaclav Smil quotes

“A useful analogy is to see traditional societies as relying on instantaneous (or minimally delayed) and constantly replenished solar income, while modern civilization is withdrawing accumulated solar capital at rates that will exhaust it in a tiny fraction of the time that was needed to create it.”
-- Vaclav Smil

Source : Vaclav Smil (2012). “Energy: A Beginner's Guide”, p.80, Oneworld Publications

#Civilization Quotes #Analogies Quotes #Tiny Quotes

“Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to another in order for stars to shine, planets to rotate, plants to grow, and civilizations to evolve.”
-- Vaclav Smil

#Stars Quotes #Order Quotes #Civilization Quotes

“...no matter how complex or affluent, human societies are nothing but subsystems of the biosphere, the Earth's thin veneer of life, which is ultimately run by bacteria, fungi and green plants.”
-- Vaclav Smil

Source : Vaclav Smil (2005). “Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties”, p.350, MIT Press

#Running Quotes #Nature Quotes #Earth Quotes

“I've read about 80 books a year for the past 50 years. I come from cultural breeding. I don't have a cellphone. When you spend all your time checking your cellphone messages, or updating your Facebook (of course I don't have a Facebook page) then you don't have any time for reading.”
-- Vaclav Smil

Source : "Meet Vaclav Smil, the Canadian polymath whose books Bill Gates is racing to read". Interview with Ritchie King, qz.com. August 08, 2013.

#Book Quotes #Reading Quotes #Past Quotes

“Everyone [in higher education] was what I call drillers of deeper wells. These academics sit at the bottom of a deep well and they look up and see a sliver of the sky. They know everything about that little sliver of sky and nothing else. I scan all my horizons.”
-- Vaclav Smil

#Sky Quotes #Littles Quotes #Horizon Quotes

“Apple! Boy, what a story. No taxes paid, everything made abroad—yet everyone worships them. This new iPhone, there’s nothing new in it. Just a golden color. What the hell, right? When people start playing with color, you know they’re played out.”
-- Vaclav Smil

Source : "This Is the Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading". Interview with Clive Thompson, www.wired.com. November 25, 2013.

#Boys Quotes #Color Quotes #Apples Quotes

“You get up and, first thing in the morning, you do your 500 words. Do it every day and you’ve got a book in eight or nine months.”
-- Vaclav Smil

Source : "This Is The Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading". Interview with Clive Thompson, www.wired.com. November 25, 2013.

#Morning Quotes #Book Quotes #Eight Quotes

“As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.”

“As I have said for many years throughout this land, we're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. Every bit of that has to change.”

“The consensus is clear. We need an immediate and determined shift to a clean, renewable economy. The continued mass burning of fossil fuels is inconsistent with a healthy, prosperous future for our civilization.”

“Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.”

“Fairy tales and mythology have always been an exaggerated distillation of the real world. Think of them as blueprints for how to deal with a multitude of situations that can arise in a person's life. The beauty of them is that their analogies resonate so deeply and they also entertain while they teach.”

“We lay down a fundamental principle of generalization by abstraction: The existence of analogies between central features of various theories implies the existence of a general theory which underlies the particular theories and unifies them with respect to those central features.”

“Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.”

“I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own.”

“You could go out with a camcorder tomorrow and make a movie with virtually no money, but promoting a tiny low-budget movie costs $20 million. And the money they spend on the big movies is astronomical.”

Source : Interview with Noel Murray, www.avclub.com. March 20, 2008.

“A person walks into a room and says hello, and your life takes a course for which you are not prepared. It's a tiny moment (almost-but not quite-unremarkable), the beginning of a hundred thousand tiny moments and some larger ones.”

Source : Anita Shreve (1989). “Eden Close: a novel”, Harcourt