Club Of Rome Quotes

We rich nations, for that is what we are, have an obligation not only to the poor nations, but to all the grandchildren of the world, rich and poor. We have not inherited this earth from our parents to do with it what we will. We have borrowed it from our children and we must be careful to use it in their interests as well as our own. Anyone who fails to recognise the basic validity of the proposition put in different ways by increasing numbers of writers, from Malthus to The Club of Rome, is either ignorant, a fool, or evil.

SCIENCE FICTION IS OFTEN DESCRIBED, AND EVEN DEFINED, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life. This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as “escapist,” but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because “it’s so depressing.

Johnny, did you ever hear of the Club of Rome?" Johnny had, but the audience would need reminding. "They were the people who did computer simulations to find out how long we could get along on our natural resources. Even with zero population growth—" "They tell us we're finished," Sharps broke in. "And that's stupid. We're only finished because they won't let us really use technology. They say we're running out of metals. There's more metal in one little asteroid than was mined all over the world in the last five years! And there are hundreds of thousands of asteroids. All we have to do is go get 'em." "Can we?" "You bet! Even with the technology we already have, we could do it. Johnny, out there in space it's raining soup, and we don't even know about soup bowls.

Just as fossil-fueled resource mastery led to more fossil fuels, it also led to more of every kind of resource being available—including the gold, mercury, silver, copper, zinc, natural gas, and petroleum the Club of Rome had predicted would have run out by now.

Traditional restraints and conventions broke down, one by one, until swords, clubs and rioting more or less replaced the ballot box.

After all, Malthus was wrong. Marx was wrong. Democracy did not die during the Great Depression as the Communists predicted. And Khrushchev did not 'bury' us. We buried him. Neville Chute's On the Beach proved as fanciful as Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May. Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb never exploded. It fizzled. The Clash of 79 produced Ronald Reagan and an era of good feelings. The Club of Rome notwithstanding, we did not run out of oil. The world did not end at the close of the second millennium, as some prophesied and others hoped. Who predicted the disappearance of the Soviet Empire? Is it not possible that today's most populous nations -China, India, and Indonesia- could break into pieces as well? Why do predictions of the Death of the West not belong on the same shelf as the predictions of 'nuclear winter' and 'global warming'? Answer: the Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen, it is a depiction of what is happening now. First World nations are dying.

We grew up in places like Georgetown and Alexandria and Chevy Chase; we were flown in great thumping silver Pan American airplanes all the way to Rome, all the way to Greece, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Hamra, Cairo; we went to American Community Schools; we spent weekends swimming at the American Club.

Founded in the 1960s by an Italian industrialist and a Scottish chemist, the Club of Rome is a talking shop for the great and the good, devoted to the worship of Malthus, and meeting behind closed doors at lavish venues. Together with its affiliates it still attracts leading names, from Al Gore and Bill Clinton to the Dalai Lama and Bianca Jagger. ‘The real enemy, then, is humanity itself,’ the Club of Rome declaimed in a book in 1993, and ‘democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and is unaware of its own limits.’ In 1974 in its second report, called ‘Mankind at the Turning Point’, the Club of Rome issued a call for creationist thinking that remains unparalleled in its technocratic arrogance: In

One of Tavistock’s chief wreckers of our way of life was Dr. Alexander King, a founder member of NATO, a favorite of the Committee and a leading member of the Club of Rome (COR). King was assigned by the COR to lower the standard of American education by taking control of the National Teachers Association and working in close conjunction with certain members of the U.S. Congress. By 1993, the National Teachers Association (NTA) had become a formidable Socialist tool in the struggle for possession of the minds of our children. Outcome Based Education (OBE) was the method whereby the wholesale socializing of American school children was being carried out. Another aspect of OBE is its heavy attention to “sex education” and pumping lesbianism and homosexuality into the minds of grade school and secondary school children

Romans certainly never thought of themselves as Greeks, but they had begun to view themselves as inhabiting the same side of the Greek-authored ethno-cultural divide that separated the civilized Hellenic world from the barbarian world, a category into which Carthage was emphatically placed. These foundation theories represented something far more potent than mere obtuse scholarly speculation. They were a body of ideas in which there had been considerable material and political investment, for they increasingly came to provide the intellectual justification for war being waged, territory being conquered, and treaties being signed. Rome’s membership of the club of civilized nations by dint of its Trojan antecedents was inherently a political decision open to periodic revision by opportunistic Hellenistic leaders (if circumstances dictated it). Indeed, the Romans themselves had been the target of a brilliant propaganda campaign waged by Pyrrhus, for silver tetradrachms that were minted under his authority were clearly designed to create a firm link in the minds of contemporaries with Alexander the Great. Among the portraits on them were the Greek heroes Heracles and Achilles.49

To show just how all pervasive the Committee of 300 is, a few words about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a Club of Rome creation and the test it ran against a nuclear power station at Three Mile Island (TMI) Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, seems in order. Termed “an accident” by a hysterical media, this was not an accident, but a deliberately designed plot to reverse favorable public opinion to nuclear power generated electricity. TMI was a crisis test for FEMA. An additional benefit was the fear and hysteria provoked by the news media, which had people fleeing the area, when in fact they were never in any danger. Bear in mind that nobody died as a result of the TMI “accident,” nor were any serious injuries reported. The stage-managed incident bore all the hall marks of a similar incident when Orson Wells scared New York and New Jersey half to death with claims that the world was being invaded by alien beings from Mars. Actually, the radio play was an adaptation of H.G. Wells “War of Worlds.” TMI was considered a success and gained favor with the anti-nuclear forces, as it provided the rallying point for the so-called “environmentalists,” well financed by Atlantic Richfield and other major oil companies and

Well, guys”—he spread his arms—“I could thank Reyna all day long. She has given so much to the legion. She’s been the best mentor and friend. She can never be replaced. On the other hand, I’m up here all alone now, and we have an empty praetor’s chair. So I’d like to take nominations for—” Lavinia started the chant: “HA-ZEL! HA-ZEL!” The crowd quickly joined in. Hazel’s eyes widened. She tried to resist when those sitting around her pulled her to her feet, but her Fifth Cohort fan club had evidently been preparing for this possibility. One of them produced a shield, which they hoisted Hazel onto like a saddle. They raised her overhead and marched her to the middle of the senate floor, turning her around and chanting, “HAZEL! HAZEL!” Reyna clapped and yelled right along with them. Only Frank tried to remain neutral, though he had to hide his smile behind his fist. “Okay, settle down!” he called at last. “We have one nomination. Are there any other—?” “HAZEL! HAZEL!” “Any objections?” “HAZEL! HAZEL!” “Then I recognize the will of the Twelfth Legion. Hazel Levesque, you are hereby promoted to praetor!” More wild cheering. Hazel looked dazed as she was dressed in Reyna’s old cloak and badge of office, then led to her chair. Seeing Frank and Hazel side by side, I had to smile. They looked so right together—wise and strong and brave. The perfect praetors. Rome’s future was in good hands. “Thank you,” Hazel managed at last. “I—I’ll do everything I can to be worthy of your trust. Here’s the thing, though. This leaves the Fifth Cohort without a centurion, so—” The entire Fifth Cohort started chanting in unison: “LAVINIA! LAVINIA!” “What?” Lavinia’s face turned pinker than her hair. “Oh, no. I don’t do leadership!” “LAVINIA! LAVINIA!” “Is this a joke? Guys, I—” “Lavinia Asimov!” Hazel said with a smile. “The Fifth Cohort read my mind. As my first act as praetor, for your unparalleled heroism in the Battle of San Francisco Bay, I hereby promote you to centurion—unless my fellow praetor has any objections?” “None,” Frank said. “Then come forward, Lavinia!

In exchange for some wide-ranging modifications demanded by the socialist government to the church’s 1929 concordat, Italy agreed to underwrite the remainder of the $406 million settlement.53 The changes to the concordat would have once been unthinkable. The church dropped its insistence that Roman Catholicism be the state religion. Moving forward, the state had to confirm church-annulled marriages. Parents were given the right to opt their children out of formerly mandatory religious education classes. And Rome was no longer considered a “sacred city,” a classification that had allowed the Vatican to keep out strip clubs and the porn industry. Italy even managed to get the church to relinquish control of the Jewish catacombs. “The new concordat is another example of the diminishing hold of the Roman Catholic church in civil life in Italy,” noted The New York Times.54 In return, Italy instituted an“eight-per-thousand” tax, in which 0.8 percent of the income tax paid by ordinary Italians was distributed to one of twelve religious organizations recognized by the state. During its early years, nearly 90 percent of the tax went to the Catholic Church (by 2010, the church received less than 50 percent as the tax was more equitably distributed). Not only did the tax relieve Italy of its responsibility for the $135 million annual subsidy it paid for the country’s 35,000 priests, it meant the church had a steady and reliable source of much needed income.55

Ah! you cliques of the city!—don’t you know you had forebears with handlebar mustaches, who came down to the river in the morning bearing masts and booms on their shoulders? who killed their own bulls with a mighty club? who made their own clothes and tilled their own earth? For a million of your clever fashionable phrases, would you exchange one single such accomplishment? I know I would—and Oh God but I’m just as futile as you are, you city vermin; I too am vermin, vermin trying to struggle back to manhood, with small success. Here is our second illuminative nugget, with no emotions this time: that the fear of the family album is pursuant to the city’s general fear of time and particularly of the past (“Oh the stupid Victorian 19th Century!” they keep crying, as though Victorianism were the whole sum of that great century). Fear of the past is in the city, thus a love, a frantic need of the present—with all the hedonistic overtones involved, the psychological doctrines of “alertness” and the so-called liberation of sexuality: in other words, giving the moment over to the dictates of sexuality (divorce is such a dictate) and leaving time, the future—which is to them equivalent to the past, as a moral factor rather than a hedonistic factor of the “pulsing present”—leaving the future to the dogs, childless marriages, or one-child “families,” broken-up families, and thus leaving the future of mankind and the race to the dogs: to the destruction at the hands of a society’s inward atom bomb of organic-familial-societal disintegration: in short, the end of a race, as in Rome. This fear of reaching back into the past, into lineality and tradition, and of extending similarly forward into the future, is like a plant drying up, dying. Where I say this, they speak of the “reality of the moment” and the danger of suppressing the urges of the moment for any reason—but I find good reason if it is to spell the continuation of our own cultural mankind. Perhaps that’s what they don’t want, like children who resent all brothers and sisters burgeoning in their mother’s womb, resenting the future after them, feeling they should be the last, final men, that none must follow—a childish emotion. But to give oneself over to childish emotions is the aim of these city intellectuals, they abstrusely find much to “scientifically” substantiate this desire in the cult of psychoanalysis and its sub-cults, the Orgone “Institute” for one splendid example, and so they go ahead blithely, and I am not the one to oppose their concepts, their march off the ship’s plank—since I am marching to a plank of my own, since I do not wish to be reviled as a neurotic and an atavistic neo-fascist, since the other night, when mentioning these objections of mine, a city intellectual had apoplexy right before me. Oh

In 1970 he was hailed on a Time magazine cover as the "Paul Revere of ecology." A year later he published The Closing Circle, an impassioned book that warned of the dangers of environmental pollution. In 1972 the Club of Rome, a loose association of scientists, technocrats, and politicians, produced The Limits to Growth. Employing computers to test economic models, the authors concluded that the world would self-destruct by the end of the century unless planners figured out ways to limit population and industrial growth and to expand supplies of food and energy.

Valentine of Rome (d. 269) A Christian priest in Rome, Valentine was known for assisting Christians persecuted under Claudius II. After being caught marrying Christian couples and helping Christians escape the persecution, Valentine was arrested and imprisoned. Although Emperor Claudius originally liked Valentine, he was condemned to death when he tried to convert the emperor. Valentine was beaten with stones, clubbed, and, finally, beheaded on February 14, 269. In the year 496, February 14 was named as a day of celebration in Valentine’s honor. He has since become the patron saint of engaged couples, beekeepers, happy marriages, lovers, travelers, young people, and greetings.

From Pastor Malthus to the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth; from hysteria over DDT, PCBs, and natural gas “fracking”; to continuing bouts of chemo-phobia and population panic; the achievements of capitalism have suffered a long series of detractions. The factitious and febrile campaign against global warming is only the latest binge of self-abuse among the children of prosperity.

For instance, on one occasion Caligula was so bored at the games that, to liven things up, he had an entire section of the crowd rounded up by his troops and dumped into the arena to be torn apart by the wild animals. The Emperor Commodus took the bloodmania even further. He loved the idea of being a heroic gladiator (but only in rigged fights). To satisfy his craving, he would have the city’s cripples tethered to stakes in the arena so he could dress as a gladiator, pretend they were giants, and enthusiastically club them to death in front of the delighted crowd For all the literary and artistic wonders of ancient Rome, we also need to recognize that Roman imperial society was complex, and it is difficult to ignore a deep element of what was definitely ‘dark’. So,

addition to the above New World Order steering groups, Henry Kissinger was then, and still is, an important agent in the service of the British Royal Institute for International Affairs, a member of the Club of Rome and a regular attendee of the occult Bohemian Grove group.  He is without a doubt one of the most

Several Top Secret recommendations were made by Dr. Aurelio Peccei of the  Club of Rome. He advocated that a plague be introduced that would have same effect as the famous Black Death of history. The chief recommendation was to develop a microbe which would attack the autoimmune system and thus render the development of a vaccine impossible.

If growth were to be abandoned as an objective of policy,’ wrote the economist Wilfred Beckerman in 1974, ‘democracy too would have to be abandoned . . . the costs of deliberate non-growth, in terms of the political and social transformation that would be required in society, are astronomical.’26 Beckerman’s influential book In Defense of Economic Growth was a scathing response to the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report and it became an instant pro-growth classic.

nothing more than a paid actor. Without his scripted teleprompter lines he is nothing. He is a pathological liar who speaks out of both sides of his mouth, and the people are so dumbed down and distracted that they just don’t catch on to this. His staff is loaded to the brim with CFR/Trilateral Commission/Bilderberg/Club of Rome members, a fact you can easily check on Google.

As I described in the “Uncorked!” chapter, the economic background in 1970 was turning grim, and sales were weakening. I was concerned. And then, once again, Scientific American came to the rescue. Each September that wonderful magazine devotes its entire issue to a single subject. In September 1970, it was the biosphere, a term I’d never seen before. It was the first time that a major scientific journal had addressed the problem of the environment. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, of course, had been serialized in the New Yorker in the late sixties, so the danger to the biosphere wasn’t exactly news, but it could be considered alarmist news. The prestige of Scientific American, however, carried weight. In fact, it knocked me out. I Suffered a Conversion on the Road to Damascus Within weeks, I subscribed to The Whole Earth Catalog, all the Rodale publications like Organic Gardening and Farming, Mother Earth, and a bunch I no longer remember. I was especially impressed by Francis Moore Lappé’s book Diet for a Small Planet. I joined the board of Pasadena Planned Parenthood, where I served for six years. Paul Ehrlich surfaced with his dismal, and proved utterly wrong, predictions. But hey! This guy was from Stanford! You had to believe him! And in 1972 all this was given statistical veracity by Jay Forrester of MIT, in the Club of Rome forecasts, which proved to be even further off the mark. But I bought them at the time. Bob Hanson, the manager of the new Trader Joe’s in Santa Ana, which was off to a slow start, was a health food nut. He kept bugging me to try “health foods.” After I’d read Scientific American, I was on board! Just how eating health foods would save the biosphere was never clear in my mind, or, in my opinion, in the mind of anyone else, except the 100 percent Luddites who wanted to return to some lifestyle approximating the Stone Age. After all, the motto of the Whole Earth Catalog was “access to tools,” hardly Luddite.

The abolishment of all individual nations’ governments and borders 2. The abolishment of all private property 3. The abolishment of all inheritance 4. The abolishment of all Patriotism 5. The abolishment of all Religion---except the one they will offer 6. The abolishment of all family and marriage 7. The culling of mankind down to a more manageable number of not more than 500 million. “A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal." -Ted Turner, Audubon magazine interview 1996, founder of CNN, Club of Rome/Bilderberg Group member, major United Nations donor and supporter, and big time proponent of the Great Plan

forever. There were experiences she and Adam had shared that she was now the only person to remember (that night in Rome, that terrible restaurant, the waiter with the dripping nose; that summer morning they had swum in the ocean, off Cape Cod; the first time they had made love), private jokes to which only she knew the punch line.

Exceptionalism is a journey. Virtuosity is a voyage. Rome wasn’t built in a day, right?

The Environmental Handbook appeared in January 1970, and the Sierra Club’s Ecotactics came out in April. Both books were largely the work of the young. Both were huge hits. Sales of the handbook reached 1.5 million, while Ecotactics sold 500,000 copies.

Actually, Nero didn’t fiddle. The violin wasn’t invented yet. While Rome burned, he was said to have played the lyre and sung.

For organizational behavior expert Charles Handy, the S-curve is the essential form of how businesses, social organizations and political systems develop over time, “it is the line of all things human.”7 Tech analyst Paul Saffo advises to “look for the S-curve,” noting that the uptake of new technologies—from personal robots to driverless cars—is destined to follow its shape.8 Scholars have used the sigmoid curve to describe the rise and fall of ancient civilizations like the Roman Empire, but also to predict modern-day shifts, such as the decline of the United States as a global superpower.9 In the field of systems thinking, the authors of the Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth put the S-curve at the heart of their analysis.10 More recently, economist Kate Raworth has shown that mainstream economics assumes that GDP growth follows an “exponential curve left hanging in mid-air,” when the reality is that it is far more likely to level off into the shape of the S-curve.

Während ich das schreibe, läßt nebenan im Werbefernsehen das Kapital seine heiligen Kühe steuerbegünstigt aufmarschieren, denen durch revolutionäre Gewalt versagt ist, am eigenen Leib zu erfahren, daß die Endlösung des Konsumproblems für den Kapitalismus im Ernstfall immer die Wegrationalisierung der Konsumenten ist; und man muß weder Kommunist noch Mitglied des Club of Rome sein, um zu prophezeihen, daß auch diese Gespenster ihrer natürlichen Bestimmung nicht entgehen werden.

Soccer is Italy’s favorite sport, and is played and watched all over the country. Each Sunday the great stadiums of Milan, Turin, Naples, Rome, and Bologna are filled with thousands of fans. Italian club soccer teams are among the best in the world, and regularly win international competitions. The national Italian team won soccer’s World Cup in 1982. Wages for successful players are high, and this helps to attract soccer stars from many other countries. Cycling also is very popular, as a sport to both do and watch. The Grand Tour of Italy takes place each year, following a long, grueling course over mountainous country. Many Italians forsake their favorite cafes to watch this bicycle race on television. Other popular pastimes include bowls, a game played on a sanded rink, and card games, commonly seen in cafes and bars across the nation. During August, many businesses close and workers go on vacation to the coast or mountains. The big cities are mostly deserted, except for tourists.

Pulled or prompted, men cam to the Everleigh club...They came to see the library, filled floor to ceiling with classics in literature and poetry and philosophy, and the art room, housing a few bona fide masterworks and a reproduction of Bernini’s famous “Apollo and Daphne,” which the sisters had failed to find in America. After learning that the original statue was at the Villa Borghese in Rome, Minna sent an artist to capture its image. She was haunted by how the exquisite nymph’s hands flowered into the branches of a laurel tree just as the god of light reaches for her. A gorgeous piece, but she mostly admired the statue for the questions it posed about clients: why did men who had everything worth having patronize the Everleigh Club? And what if the thing they desired most in this world simply vanished?

When I write, I wait for the sudden appearance of signs and portents in the air, always on the lookout for secret messages encoded in graffiti or heralds disguised as strangers in the club cars of trains. A bright encounter with twins, a brother and sister, on a morning flight to Rome changed the entire configuration of the Wingo family in The Prince of Tides.