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Vaclav Smil Quotes

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.

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
Stars, Order, Civilization

...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
Running, Nature, Green Plants
Vaclav Smil (2005). “Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties”, p.350, MIT Press

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
Morning, Book, Eight
"This Is The Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading". Interview with Clive Thompson, www.wired.com. November 25, 2013.

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
Book, Reading, Past
"Meet Vaclav Smil, the Canadian polymath whose books Bill Gates is racing to read". Interview with Ritchie King, qz.com. August 08, 2013.

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
Sky, Horizon, Looks

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
Boys, Iphone, Color
"This Is the Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading". Interview with Clive Thompson, www.wired.com. November 25, 2013.

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
Civilization, Income, Analogies
Vaclav Smil (2012). “Energy: A Beginner's Guide”, p.80, Oneworld Publications

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