A Quote by Kurt Vonnegut

Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.

Kurt Vonnegut

Quote Topics

Any Artists Because Before Canaries Coal Danger Filled Gas Keel Like Long Mines More Over Poison Poison Gas Realize Robust Sensitive Society Types Useful

Quote Author

Kurt Vonnegut
American - Writer
November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007

Birds are, especially canaries, are super sensitive to hydrogen sulfide and sour gas.

David Suzuki

Natural gas emits only half the carbon dioxide of coal when burned, but if methane leaks when oil companies extract it from the ground in a sloppy manner - methane is far more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - it can wipe out all the advantages of natural gas over coal.

Thomas Friedman

It is very different to make a practical system and to introduce it. A few experiments in the laboratory would prove the practicability of system long before it could be brought into general use. You can take a pipe and put a little coal in it, close it up, heat it and light the gas that comes out of the stem, but that is not introducing gas lighting. I'll bet that if it were discovered to-morrow in New York that gas could be made out of coal it would be at least five years before the system would be in general use.

Thomas A. Edison

Coal used to be a very dirty fuel but coal has become cleaner and cleaner over the decades. Clean coal now is quite clean. Clean coal now has the same emissions profile as natural gas. Clean coal can become cleaner still. We can take even more of the pollutants out of coal and I believe we should. Clean coal, I think, is the immediate answer to Canada's energy needs and the world's energy needs. There are hundreds of years available of coal supplies. We shouldn't be squandering that resource. We should be using it prudently.

Lawrence Solomon

The image that I remember most of all is of the Fenerbahçe players storming into the stadium before kickoff. They were called the canaries because of their yellow jerseys. It was as if they, like canaries, were fluttering into the stadium out of a hole. I loved it. It was poetry.

Orhan Pamuk

Today, natural gas now outstrips coal as the leading provider of electricity in America. If this is as big as people believe it is, natural gas will soon be powering trucks and marine ships. Maybe even standard commercial cars that people use at home through compressed natural gas, other gas to liquids. The potential is there for more energy independence by America and a reliance on cleaner fuel - natural gas emits half as much as coal, in terms of carbon emissions. That's a real bounty.

Thomas Friedman

Many coal-fired power plants are being decommissioned or switched over to natural gas, but that takes a long time.

Porter Stansberry

First of all, the idea that natural gas is better than coal is a lie, especially when it comes to fracking for natural gas. It is a lie that was bought into by a lot of Democrats and a lot of environmentalists because I think they wanted to have a win against something; against coal.

Josh Fox

Are artists the canaries in the mine, warning of the coming explosion before anyone else? It's hard to look at the world before 1914 and not wonder if they somehow felt a catastrophe was bearing down on them and their societies.

Margaret MacMillan

There is a thing called clean coal. Coal will last for 1,000 years in America. Now we have natural gas and so many other things because of technology. We have unbelievable - we have found over the last seven years, we have found tremendous wealth right under our feet. So good. Especially when you have $20 trillion in debt.

Donald Trump

Natural gas will displace coal in power generation. Getting natural gas into the transportation fleet is harder. It works best for vehicles that work from centralized fueling facilities like trucking fleets or buses and cabs. That is happening. Before it can make big inroads beyond that, infrastructure is going to need to be developed.

John S. Watson

My great-grandfather was a coal miner, who worked in Pennsylvania mines when carts were pulled by mules and mines were lit by candles. Mining was very dangerous work then.

Tim Murphy

Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells.

Thomas Frank

Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria.

Larry Wall

The idea of some people being less than people is poison to any society and needs to be named as such in order to halt its spread before it turns the soul of a society septic.