I'm old fashioned. I'm not one of these young guys who think they are so smart that they can prescribe what humanity ought to do. Humanity never learns any lessons. Prescriptions don't matter. We already know exactly what to do. We just don't do it.
Interpretation
Humanity is aware of its issues but often fails to act on the knowledge.
This quote emphasizes that, despite having the knowledge and understanding of what needs to be done to improve humanity, people frequently choose inaction. Vaclav Smil reflects on the idea that the challenges humanity faces are not new, and solutions are often clear, yet there remains a gap between knowledge and action, indicating a deeper issue in human behavior and decision-making.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech on environmental awareness to highlight the need for action rather than just knowledge.
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.
Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing - from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What's very important is in-house research.
America tends to assume Silicon Valley-style innovators can drive quick and transformative changes, but even Silicon Valley's would-be masters of the universe have discovered that energy transitions are subject to time spans and technical constraints that defy their reach.
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.
Most scientific or engineering discoveries would never become successful products without contributions from other scientists or engineers. Every major invention is the child of far-flung parents who may never meet.
Economic and technical imperatives - not any preconceived directives - will keep propelling the process of energy transition.
I have criticized absent people so often, and then discovered, to my humiliation, that I was talking with their relatives, that I have grown superstitious about that sort of thing and dropped it.
I divide the world into three Classes - The few who make things happen, the many who watch things happen, the overwhelming majority who have no notion of what happens.
We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.
Talk is cheap...It is the way we organize and use our lives everyday that tells what we believe in.
Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.
Very few men are wise by their own council, or learned by their own teaching. For he that was only taught by himself, had a fool for a master.
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