“There is no reason we can't design a car to last for 35 years instead ...” — Vaclav Smil Quote

There is no reason we can't design a car to last for 35 years instead of six or seven.

The history of energy use is a sequence of transitions to sources that are cheaper, cleaner, and more flexible.

The problems that ail the U.S. economy and American society are one and the same: Both consume too much and refuse to make badly needed changes. This is true above all in the realm of energy.

If everyone wants to eat like people in Bangladesh, then we would have food coming out of everybody's ears.

I studied what the Germans call the Naturwissenschaften, the natural sciences. Everything from biology to geology. How the clouds are formed, how the animals live, and what makes the rocks. So I know about nature. Period.

I was one of the more talented ones at the design firm I joined, so I conducted my work pretty shrewdly. Except I wasn't a morning person, so I was quite frequently late for work. On top of that, it was a fairly big company, they were fussy about the dress code, and I got chewed out quite often.

Men are the weaker sex and retain their immaturity, it seems, to the grave. It's like a built-in design fault. You can't do anything about it.

I've always had an interest in design, and I have always loved creating things.

Embedded in 'The New York Times' institutional perspective and reporting methodologies are all sorts of quite debatable and subjective political and cultural assumptions about the world. And with some noble exceptions, 'The Times,' by design or otherwise, has long served the interests of the same set of elite and powerful factions.