Obsolescence Quotes - Page 2

• Planned obsolescence is another word for progress.

  James Jeffrey Roche

  Progress, Planned Obsolescence

  4 Copy quote

• Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Fate, Dies

  Stephen Jay Gould (1990). “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History”, p.18, W. W. Norton & Company

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

• Styling is designing for obsolescence.

  Alec Guinness

  Design

  5 Copy quote

• God made the human body like a machine with built-in obsolescence.

  Vikas Swarup

  Machines, Body, Made

  Vikas Swarup (2013). “The Accidental Apprentice”, p.12, Simon and Schuster

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.

  Aldous Huxley

  Civilization, Three, Debt

  104 Copy quote

• Aviation is a dynamic profession. The rate of obsolescence of equipment is high and new aircraft have to be placed in inventory periodically in order to stay abreast of the requirements of modern war.

  Keith B. McCutcheon

  War, Marine, Order

  16 Copy quote

• The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and even aggressive. The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. Something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Men, Errors, Doors

  John Kenneth Galbraith (1969). “The affluent society”, Hamish Hamilton

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• by operating on the principle of human and material obsolescence, America eats her history alive.

  Gail Sheehy

  America, History, Principles

  Gail Sheehy (1971). “Speed is of the Essence”, Richmond Hill, Ont. : Simon & Schuster of Canada

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.

  Lewis Mumford

  Fashion, Machines, Leisure

  "The City in History". Book by Lewis Mumford. Chapter: "Myth of Megalopolis", 1961.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• People always worry that buying tech products today carries a risk of obsolescence. Most of the time, that fear is overblown.

  Walt Mossberg

  People, Worry, Risk

  4 Copy quote

• Parents accept their obsolescence with the best grace they can muster. . . they do all they can to make it easy for the younger generation to surpass the older, while secretly dreading the rejection that follows.

  Christopher Lasch

  Rejection, Parent, Grace

  10 Copy quote

• In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time. Unless teachers can hold up a model of lifelong learning and adaptation, graduates are likely to find themselves trapped into obsolescence as the world changes around them. Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Life, Teacher, Moving

  Mary Catherine Bateson (2001). “Composing a Life”, p.14, Grove Press

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• The more subtle thing is more speculative. The world is well past its long-term carrying capacity for human beings living a European, much less an American, lifestyle predicated on planned obsolescence. International economic growth is largely a matter of accelerated movement of materials from mines and forests to the dump. Instead of saving and buying decent furniture we can pass on to our children, we charge our credit cards for shaped heaps of sawdust and glue that fall apart in less than three or four years.

  Denis Hayes

  Children, Fall, Past

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Price, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal." Even more unfortunately, the industries that are favored by such expansion must, to maintain their output, be devoted to goods that are readily consumable either by their nature, or because they are so shoddily fabricated that they must soon be replaced. By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.

  Lewis Mumford

  Fashion, Mean, Goal

  LEWIS MUMFORD (1961). “THE CITY IN HISTORY”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed souffles and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Falling In Love, Art, Book

  8 Copy quote

• There is a disease to which plays as well as men become liable with advancing years. In men it is called doting, in plays dating.The more topical the play the more it dates.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Men, Years, Play

  18 Copy quote

• Go spit in the face of our inevitable obsolescence and finish your @#$&ng novel.

  John Green

  Writing, Faces, Spit

  4 Copy quote

• Only one rational path is open to us - simultaneous de-development of the [overdeveloped countries] and semi-development of the underdeveloped countries (UDCs), in order to approach a decent and ecologically sustainable standard of living for all in between. By de-development we mean lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer gadgets, and the abolition of planned obsolescence.

  John Holdren

  Country, Mean, Order

  4 Copy quote

• The effect of the post-Enlightenment project for human society is that all human activity is absorbed into labor. It becomes an unending cycle of production for the sake of consumption. The modern concept of "built-in obsolescence" makes this clear. The cycle of production and consumption has to be kept going, and the work of the artist or craftsman who aims to create something enduring becomes marginal to the economic order.

  Lesslie Newbigin

  Artist, Order, Enlightenment

  9 Copy quote

• Like Godard, Tati is also remarkably appreciative of the odd beauty that can be revealed in the shapes, patterns and colors created by the technology of planned obsolescence.

  Vincent Canby

  Technology, Color, Shapes

  4 Copy quote

• Rant said that view of time was set up so folks won't live forever. It's the planned obsolescence we've all agreed to...'Nothing says you have to swallow this,' Rant told me. 'You can always just die.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Views, Forever, Said

  4 Copy quote

• Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.

  Fred Brooks

  Maintenance, Delay, Execution

  5 Copy quote

• I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourself, and that is very hard to do and often comes with undeniable anger.

  Douglas Coupland

  Thinking, Degrees, Generations

  4 Copy quote

• Today the West exists only to bear witness to its own obsolescence.

  Dinesh D'Souza

  Today, West, Bears

  12 Copy quote