Power corrupts, but we want energy.

All this fantastic effort — giant machines, road networks, strip mines, conveyor belt, pipelines, slurry lines, loading towers, railway and electric train, hundred-million-dollar coal-burning power plant; ten thousand miles of high-tension towers and high-voltage power lines; the devastation of the landscape, the destruction of Indian homes and Indian grazing lands, Indian shrines and Indian burial grounds; the poisoning of the last big clean-air reservoir in the forty-eight contiguous United States, the exhaustion of precious water supplies — all that ball-breaking labor and all that backbreaking expense and all that heartbreaking insult to land and sky and human heart, for what? All that for what? Why, to light the lamps of Phoenix suburbs not yet built, to run the air conditioners of San Diego and Los Angeles, to illuminate shopping-center parking lots at two in the morning, to power aluminum plants, magnesium plants, vinyl-chloride factories and copper smelters, to charge the neon tubing that makes the meaning (all the meaning there is) of Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Tucson, Salt Lake City, the amalgamated metropoli of southern California, to keep alive that phosphorescent putrefying glory (all the glory there is left) called Down Town, Night Time, Wonderville, U.S.A.

We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.

We were on a joyride, on free energy almost. [...] It seems to me we need something like the Manhattan Project. We need some urgency saying, "Here's what we should be doing. We've got to get off fossil fuels."

I know people that are paying five times as much now for electricity. People are paying three or four times more for gas. There’s not enough of it. It’s very expensive.

Power and the money, money and the power Minute after minute, hour after hour Everybody's runnin', but half of them ain't lookin' It's goin' on in the kitchen, but I don't know what's cookin'

Power to the people We don't want it We want pleasure And the TVs try to rape us And I guess that they're succeeding And we're going to these meetings But we're not doing any meeting And we're trying to be faithful, but we're Cheating, cheating, cheating

I'm sure you petroleum folks understand that solar power will solve all our problems. How much money have we blown on that? This is the hippies' program from the seventies and they're still pushing this stuff.

Power power, everybody like wants power

We pay for light, pay for water, next thing you know
We'll pay to breathe harder

We are like a wishing well
And a bolt of electricity

Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it.

They are developing a form of renewable energy that runs on hubris.

People think there's some real subversive thing playing against whoever it is; a lot of it is just people who want to go along and get along. And they also want to make money. And the bottom line is, they're going to put out as much stuff as they can — stupid, banal stuff that makes money.