8 Quotes by David Lilienthal

Centralization at the national capital or within a business undertaking always glorifies the importance of pieces of paper This dims the sense of reality.

The idea of Utopia is mischievous as well as unrealistic. And dull, to boot. Man is born pushing and shoving as the sparks fly upward.

Out of the best and most productive years of each man’s life, he should carve a segment in which he puts his private career aside to serve his community and his country, and thereby serve his children, his neighbours, his fellow men, and the cause of freedom.

It is chiefly upon the lay citizen, informed about science but not its practitioner, that the country must depend in determining the use to which science is put, in resolving the many public policy questions that scientific discoveries constantly force upon us.

We keep saying, ‘We have no other course.’ What we should say is: ‘We are not bright enough to see any other course.’

The subject of management is man; the objective of management is the moving of man’s mind and will and imagination.

Within the next few years-a decade perhaps-we should be in a position to unlock new knowledge about life and matter so great that wholly new concepts of human life will follow in the wake of this new knowledge.

Big business is basic to the very life of this country; and yet many -perhaps most – Americans have a deep-seated fear and an emotional repugnance to it. Here is monumental contradiction.