Turbines Quotes

• Hopelessly uneconomic on any substantial scale, since it requires a conventional power back-up for when the wind stops blowing, forests of wind turbines are rightly regarded in most countries as an environmental monstrosity.

  Nigel Lawson

  Country, Wind, Environmental

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• The current anger at the march of turbines and pylons across the hills of Britain is not from nimbys. Government money has lubricated most backyard owners to support wind power. It comes from those who appreciate the beauty of the countryside and who question the industrial spoliation of miles of open landscape for a pitiful net gain to climate change.

  Simon Jenkins

  Government, Wind, Appreciate

  "Ecotowns and turbines are a political slap in the face of the landscape" by Simon Jenkins, www.theguardian.com. July 16, 2009.

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• Onshore wind turbines are visually a very considerable intrusion on any landscape.

  Tim Yeo

  Wind, Landscape, Intrusion

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• The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of five-hundred-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons, and wires.

  Paul Kingsnorth

  Wind Turbines, Feet, Mountain

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• I wouldn't be against them (large wind turbines) if they actually worked.

  James Lovelock

  Wind, Wind Turbines, Ifs

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• Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using - you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?

  Aldous Huxley

  Fall, Brave New World, Giving

  Aldous Huxley (1933). “Retrospect: an omnibus of Aldous Huxley's books”

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• When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in my thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance.

  Nikola Tesla

  Running, Ideas, Imagination

  Nikola Tesla (2016). “My Inventions: And Other Writings”, p.6, Courier Dover Publications

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• We must not let ourselves be swept off our feet in horror at the danger of nuclear power. Nuclear power is not infinitely dangerous. It's just dangerous, much as coal mines, petrol repositories, fossil-fuel burning and wind turbines are dangerous.

  David J. C. MacKay

  Wind, Feet, Nuclear

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• And then the turbines generate electricity that goes into the whole town." "You mean they aren't powered by giant hamsters on wheels? I was misinformed.

  Michael Grant

  Mean, Giants, Towns

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• We seem to forget that everything that is good for the environment is a job. Solar panels don't put themselves up. Wind turbines don't manufacture themselves. Houses don't retrofit themselves and put in their own new boilers and furnaces and better-fitting windows and doors. Advanced biofuel crops don't plant themselves. Community gardens don't tend themselves. Farmers' markets don't run themselves. Every single thing that is good for the environment is actually a job, a contract, or an entrepreneurial opportunity.

  Van Jones

  Running, Jobs, Business

  Van Jones (2013). “Rebuild the Dream”, p.187, Nation Books

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• Even if you accept the theory of man-made climate change, wind turbines are a rotten way to reduce CO2 emissions, or to improve energy security.

  Roger Helmer

  Men, Wind, Rotten

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• I find those wind turbines around Lake George to be utterly offensive. I think they're just a blight on the landscape.

  Joe Hockey

  Thinking, Lakes, Wind

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• People forget: solar panels don't put themselves up. Wind turbines don't manufacture themselves. Businesses don't retrofit themselves to waste less energy and water, nor do homes weatherize themselves.

  Van Jones

  Home, Wind, People

  Source: rooseveltinstitute.org

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• I remembered seeing it and it was this metallic turbine and I thought it was beautiful. I had never been in a power plant before, but I felt, without being overly dramatic, compelled to make photographs of this for myself.

  John Sexton

  Beautiful, Artist, Photographer

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• I do not rush into constructive work. When I get an idea, I start right away to build it up in my mind. I change the structure, I make improvements, I experiment, I run the device in my mind. It is absolutely the same to me whether I operate my turbine in thought or test it actually in my shop. It makes no difference, the results are the same. In this way, you see, I can rapidly develop and perfect an invention, without touching anything.

  Nikola Tesla

  Running, Ideas, Differences

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• Is it a spiral of water in the tragic gleam of a revolver, an egg, a glistening arc or the floodgate of reason, a keen ear attuned to a mineral hiss, or a turbine of algebraic formulas? (On Man Ray's first photograms, 1921.)

  Tristan Tzara

  Men, Eggs, Water

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• The famous statue of Christ the Redeemer that overlooks Rio de Janeiro is only 130 feet tall. McGuinty's eco-idols [Wind Turbines] will be three times that height, but will serve the same imposing purpose.

  Ezra Levant

  Idols, Wind, Feet

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• Conventional turbines only work up to 200 feet, but capturing a small fraction of the global wind energy at higher altitudes could be sufficient to supply the current energy needs of the globe.

  Saul Griffith

  Wind, Feet, Energy

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• I used to think Cape Wind was a great idea. That was when Ted Kennedy was alive and railing about how he might spill his Chivas if he had to keep maneuvering the Mya around all those noisy seagull-murdering wind turbines. Anything Ted Kennedy was against, I was for.

  Howie Carr

  Thinking, Wind, Ideas

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• Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world's greatest creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. it meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.

  Terry Pratchett

  Strong, Revenge, Mean

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• In case you haven't noticed, they're moving a lot faster. I don't know about the laws of physics on your planet, but where I come from an object moving at subclass speed can't catch up to one running at starclass. But if you know something about turbines, thrusters and engines, quantum or classical physics that I've somehow missed, then please enlighten me. - Caillen Dagan to Desideria Denarii

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Running, Moving, Law

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• Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.

  Walter Benjamin

  Oil, Doe, Machines

  Walter Benjamin, Michael William Jennings, Edmund Jephcott (2016). “One-Way Street”, p.21, Harvard University Press

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• Replacing half of the U.S. ground-transport fuels with hydrogen from wind power by 2050, for example, might require 1,400 gigawatts of advanced wind turbines or more... replacing those fuels with electricity might require less than 400 GW.

  Joseph J. Romm

  Wind, Climate, Example

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• If being original means having to throw paint in front of a jet turbine to hit a canvas 50 ft away then lets not be original.

  Shepard Fairey

  Mean, Canvas, Paint

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• Franchement, quand je survole certains pays européens (les éoliennes) ne donne pas envie. (Frankly, when I fly over some European countries, their turbines don't fill me with envy.)

  Nicolas Sarkozy

  Country, Wind, Envy

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