Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

None but he who knows the machine--not in its drawings and models only, but in its breathing and throbbings--who unconsciously thinks of it while standing by it, can really improve it.

Scientific education on a wide scale has become necessary for further inventions, and that education is refused to the workers.

Some of them indulge in jingo talk about crushing all foreign industries out of competition, while the others see in technical education nothing but a means of somewhat improving the flesh-machine of the factory and of transferring a few…

Waste of time is the leading feature of our present education.

Not only are we taught a mass of rubbish, but what is not rubbish is taught so as to make us waste over it as much time as possible.

It is evident that the years of childhood ought not to be spent so uselessly as they are now.

Superficiality, parrot-like repetition, slavishness and inertia of mind are the results of our method of education.

What has remained of the human being in those shivering bodies?

But there is also the time-saving celerity of the well-trained worker, and this is surely achieved best by the kind of education which we advocate.

However plain his work, the educated worker makes it better and quicker than the uneducated.

In short, in each branch of science a revision of the current theories as well as new wide generalisations are wanted.

In short, there is not one single science which does not suffer in its development from a want of men and women endowed with a philosophical conception of the universe, ready to apply their forces of investigation in a given field, however…

The rate of scientific progress would have been tenfold; and if the individual would not have the same claims on posterity’s gratitude as he has now, the unknown mass would have done the work with more speed and with more prospect for…

When all over the world industry already was transforming motion into heat, sound, light, and electricity, and each one into each other, then only came Grove’s theory of the “correlation of physical forces”; and Grove’s work had the same…

Even the empirical knowledge of the laws of electrical currents was in its infancy when a few bold men laid a cable at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, despite the warnings of the authorised men of science.

The name of “applied science” is quite misleading, because, in the great majority of cases, invention, far from being an application of science, on the contrary creates a new branch of science.

This character of invention, which is to make a start in advance of former knowledge, instead of merely applying a law, makes it identical, as to the processes of mind, with discovery; and, therefore, people who are slow in invention are…

In most cases, the inventor, however inspired by the general state of science at a given moment, starts with a very few settled facts at his disposal.

The scientific facts taken into account for inventing the steam-engine, or the telegraph, or the phonograph were strikingly elementary.

The flight of genius which has characterised the workers at the outset of modern industry has been missing in our professional men of science.

But, whatever the occupations preferred by everyone, everyone will be the more useful in his own branch if he is in possession of a serious scientific knowledge.

How much better the historian and the sociologist would understand humanity if they knew it, not in books only, not in a few of its representatives, but as a whole, in its daily life, daily work, and daily affairs!

The so-called “division of labour” has grown under a system which condemned the masses to toil all the day long, and all the life long, at the same wearisome kind of labour.

It would not know the duality of conscience which permeates our life and stifles every noble effort.

And the division and subdivision--the permanent subdivision--of functions has been pushed so far as to divide humanity into castes which are almost as firmly established as those of old India.