Quotes & Sayings About Obsolescence

I have this old '57 Porsche Speedster, and the way the door closes, I'll just sit there and listen to the sound of the latch going, 'cluh-CLICK-click.' That door! I live for that door. Whatever the opposite of planned obsolescence is, that's what I'm into. — Jerry Seinfeld

Planned obsolescence is not really a new concept. God used it with people. — Robert Orben

It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing. — Mary McCarthy

Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like'. Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. Until we see how unbalanced our culture has become at this point, we will not be able to deal with the mammon spirit within ourselves nor will we desire Christian simplicity. — Richard J. Foster

Obsolescence is the very hallmark of progress. — Henry Ford II

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

Immunity to obsolescence is the only obsolescent-immune conceit of the past millennium. — Matt Mullenweg

The books [poetry collections] may not sell, but neither are they given away or thrown away. They tend, more than other books, to fall apart in their owners' hands. Not I suppose good news in a culture and economy built on obsolescence. But for a book to be loved this way and turned to this way for consolation and intense renewable excitement seems to me a marvel. — Louise Gluck

Britain today is suffering from galloping obsolescence. — Tony Benn

In the human heart there is a built-in obsolescence factor. It does not matter how powerful and influential you are, how much education you have, how selfcontrolled or holy you consider yourself - your heart, if you do not guard it, will break down. — K.P. Yohannan

When the old ways disappear, as perhaps they must, it is regrettable that so little is saved from them, so that those who practice them suffer the penalty of obsolescence, as the poor folk of a new and more efficient world. — Philip L. Wagner

Publishers, naturally, loathe used books and have developed strategies to depress the secondhand market. They bring out new, even more expensive editions of popular textbooks every three to four years, in a classic cycle of planned obsolescence. — James Surowiecki

God made the human body like a machine with built-in obsolescence. — Vikas Swarup

When a new object emerges that satisfies the same purpose as an older one, the older one falls into obsolescence. — Koji Suzuki

Styling is designing for obsolescence. — Alec Guinness

He put an arm around me and helped me across the lawn into the passenger's seat. The inside was red and white as a strawberry sundae, with black analog gauges. It was inefficient and sprawling; it screamed of hubris and excess and obsolescence; it was America on wheels. — Mishell Baker

There were railroads in the wilderness now; people who used to go overland by carriage or horseback to the River landings for the Memphis and New Orleans steamboats could take the train from almost anywhere now. And presently Pullmans too, all the way from Chicago and the Northern cities and the Northern money, the Yankee dollars arriving between sheets and even in drawing rooms to open the wilderness, nudge it further and further toward obsolescence with the whine of saws; what had been one vast unbroken virgin span was now booming with cotton and timber both. Or rather, booming with simple money: increment's troglodyte which had fathered twin ones: solvency and bankruptcy, the three of them booming money into the land so fast now that the problem was to get rid of it before it whelmed you into strangulation. — William Faulkner

Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence. — Brooks Stevens

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

Obsolescence is a factor which says that the new thing I bring you is worth more than the unused value of the old thing. — Charles Kettering

Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster. — Aldous Huxley

We live in a disposable, 'cast-off and throw-away' society that has largely lost any real sense of permanence. Ours is a world of expiration dates, limited shelf life, and planned obsolescence. Nothing is absolute. — Myles Munroe

Obsolescence and death, the reign of the archaic, the abandoned, and the corny: Really, if you saw Windows 3.0 on the sidewalk outside the building, would you bend over and pick it up?!? — Bruce Sterling

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

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. — Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance. — Marshall McLuhan

Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning. — Marshall McLuhan

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell. — Studs Terkel

If I seem to be over-interested in junk, it is because I am, and I have a lot of it, too - half a garage full of bits and broken pieces. I use these things for repairing other things. Recently I stopped my car in front of the display yard of a junk dealer near Sag Harbor. As I was looking courteously at the stock, it suddenly occurred to me that I had more than he had. But it can be seen that I do have a genuine and almost miserly interest in worthless objects. My excuse is that in this era of planned obsolescence, when a thing breaks down I can usually find something in my collection to repair it - a toilet, or a motor, or a lawn mower. But I guess the truth is that I simply like junk. — John Steinbeck

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

By operating on the principle of human and material obsolescence, America eats her history alive. — Gail Sheehy

But planned obsolescence is possible only if the rate of technological change is contained. — David Harvey

The great question that hovers over this issue, one that we have dealt with mainly by indifference, is the question of what people are for. Is their greatest dignity in unemployment? Is the obsolescence of human beings now our social goal? One would conclude so from our attitude toward work, especially the manual work necessary to the long-term preservation of the land, and from our rush toward mechanization, automation, and computerization. In a country that puts an absolute premium on labor-saving measures, short workdays, and retirement, why should there be any surprise at permanence of unemployment and welfare dependency? Those are only different names for our national ambition. — Wendell Berry

Many people are afraid to teach because they don't think they know enough. I hope I've put the lie to that. But also consider this: work in brain science has shown that nothing is better for maintaining your memory and critical thinking skills as you age than continuous learning. And remember, there's no better way to learn than to teach. This is not to mention the threat of obsolescence. As the pace of technological change has quickened, the pace of change throughout all of work life has been cranked up, and those who don't constantly work out on the cognitive treadmill find themselves lapped by the new young things right out of college. Finally, — Richie Etwaru

Instead, most colleges are studies in obsolescence. — Kent McCord

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

We then return our gaze to the mirror-boxed future-towns circling us-the hard drives of our culture, where the human tribe is making flesh its deepest needs and fears; teaching machines to think; accelerating the pace of obsolescence; designing new animals to replace the animals we've erased; value adding; reconstructing the future. — Douglas Coupland

Knowledge cannot be taken away from anyone except by obsolescence. — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die. — Stephen Jay Gould

Name anything - high-definition TV, computer obsolescence - and I'm pretty much annoyed by it. — Martin Freeman

Because if there's one thing worse than an IT manager who's feeling the chill wind of obsolescence blowing down his neck and consequently trying to contribute code to the repository like an actual working developer, it's an IT manager who's getting creative. — Charles Stross

The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence. — Art Linkletter

Having a child is sowing the seeds of your own obsolescence: birth is the fuse that leads to that other thing. You appear, you replace yourself, you die. — Michael Redhill

Immerse yourself in the mesmerising patchwork of flatland invaded by water, desolate roads of industrial obsolescence, and a dark history — Ben Handicott

Starving the future to feed the present is a mistake - it leads to obsolescence and stagnation. Sometimes it is hard to make this understood. — Burton Richter

The simple truth is that there is an optimum rate of replacement, a best time for replacement. It would be an advantage for a manufacturer to have his factory and equipment destroyed by bombs only if the time had arrived when, through deterioration and obsolescence, his plant and equipment had already acquired a null or a negative value and the bombs fell just when he should have called in a wrecking crew or ordered new equipment anyway. — Henry Hazlitt

In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle. — Charles Stross

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

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

The Constitution charges the president to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed"; Obamaland contends that it is simply engaging in executive discretion. But Judge Hanen countered, "Exercising prosecutorial discretion and/or refusing to enforce a statute does not also entail bestowing benefits" - such as Social Security cards, work permits, and the ability to travel. In supporting the president's imperious go-it-alone approach, Democratic leaders have acquiesced to what Turley calls "their own institutional obsolescence." They've handed a tool of mischief to the next chief executive. — Anonymous

Planned obsolescence is another word for progress. — James Jeffrey Roche

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

Consumer culture is best supported by markets made up of sexual clones, men who want objects and women who want to be objects, and the object desired ever-changing, disposable, and dictated by the market. The beautiful object of consumer pornography has a built-in obsolescence, to ensure that as few men as possible will form a bond with one woman for years or for a lifetime, and to ensure that women's dissatisfaction with themselves will grow rather than diminish over time. Emotionally unstable relationships, high divorce rates, and a large population cast out into the sexual marketplace are good for business in a consumer economy. Beauty pornography is intent on making modern sex brutal and boring and only as deep as a mirror's mercury, anti-erotic for both men and women. — Naomi Wolf

In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession. — Marshall McLuhan

Outside Soviet Russia, and following the last symphonies of Mahler, Nielsen and Sibelius, an element of obsolescence has unmistakably attached itself to the genre. One could, perhaps, be forgiven for regarding Stravinsky's two ironic stylizations of the symphony as a fitting farewell salute. And yet the Shostakovich symphonies have, in Philip Larkin's phrase, 'penetrated the public mind' to an extent that has put them on a level with Beethoven. — Pauline Fairclough

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

Many profit-driven corporate strategies are based on fashion, planned obsolescence, unneeded upgrades, and masterful emotional manipulation --marketing--causing people to continuously replace goods which are still in good working order. — Jacob Lund Fisker

The sumptuous age of stars and images is reduced to a few artificial tornado effects, pathetic fake buildings, and childish tricks which the crowd pretends to be taken in by to avoid feeling too disappointed. Ghost towns, ghost people. The whole place has the same air of obsolescence about it as Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard. — Jean Baudrillard

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

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

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

Journalism, spooked by rumors of its own obsolescence, has stopped believing in itself. Groans of doom alternate with panicked happy talk. — Maureen Dowd