Vaclav Smil Quotes

#1. There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

Bill Gates

#2. Truth telling is the first building block of character
a quality that seems to be getting rarer and rarer in all-forgiving America.

Mona Charen

#3. I am a Californian, and we have twice the individuality and originality of any people in the United States. We always get quite huffy when we are spoken of as merely Americans.

Gertrude Atherton

#4. 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

#5. At this point I think we need to embrace the weird. High-five it. Give it our phone number.

Jim Zub

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Fear manifested itself as a physical presence that
seemed to dominate the public sphere. Time almost stopped. Even without
confirmation I could sense that something had gone terribly wrong.

Phindiwe Nkosi

#9. 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

#10. They chose to be different. And in doing so, they proved that through struggle, sacrifice and service, staggering personal transformation is possible.

Adam Braun

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. I knew who I was as a girl but I had to find who I was as a woman.

Delta Goodrem

#14. 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

#15. I want to be remembered as a great athlete. As a boxing champion.

Idi Amin

#16. As we continue advancing and leveraging GIS and as we keep bringing in new generations of technology as well as new generations of people, my sense is we're going to achieve extraordinary things.

Jack Dangermond

#17. Our approach to medicine is very 19th-century. We are still in the dark ages. We really need to get to the molecular level so that we are no longer groping about in the dark.

Anne Wojcicki

#18. Stop trying to make thing happen for yourself, and let them happen to you.

Irv Thomas

#19. The American fantasy of love is the 'meet-cute,' 'Love at first sight,' and 'You had me at hello!' The completely spontaneous version of accidental love, which doesn't care about demographics and social compatibility.

Susan Straight

#20. Superiority? Inferiority?
Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?

Frantz Fanon

#21. Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.

Iain M. Banks