EXPIRES: 1960

WRITTEN: 1930

Once we recognise this with all the clearness that the clearness of the fact itself demands we must then rise up against the 19th century. If it is evident that there was in it something extraordinary and incomparable, it is no less so that it must have suffered from certain radical vices, certain constitutional defects, when it brought into being a caste of men- the mass-man in revolt who are placing in imminent danger those very principles to which they owe their existence. If that human type continues to be master in Europe, thirty years will suffice to send our continent back to barbarism. Legislative and industrial technique will disappear with the same facility with which so many trade secrets have often disappeared.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

The Revolt of the Masses

Written: 1930

Addressed to: 1960

Source: The Revolt of the Masses

Author: Jose Ortega y Gasset

Category: Culture & Society

Annotation

2000

In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future. Citizens of the world's richest and most technically advanced nations will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change.

Alvin Toffler

2014

Indeed, the most somber speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!

Isaac Asimov

1975

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served... Low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.

Jane Jacobs