James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of the age, and humanity made its first tentative steps into an industrial way of life that would, over the next two centuries, forever change the world.
Jeremy RifkinHumanity cannot afford to acknowledge all of the blood that it spills and the destruction it inflicts on the world in its effort to perpetuate itself. Desacralization is a process that allows us to sever any relationship we might feel to other living things. By draining the aliveness out of things, we can pretend that our control and manipulation are of little consequence. Man the trapper becomes man the taxidermist, disemboweling nature of its spontaneity and movement, and stuffing it with a leaden inanimateness.
Jeremy RifkinWe are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.
Jeremy RifkinGenerations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.
Jeremy Rifkin